


nothing like a princess

by napricot



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Bucky Barnes's Notebooks, Captain America: Civil War (Movie) Mid-Credits Scene, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Post-Captain America: Civil War (Movie), Sam Wilson-centric
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-06
Updated: 2017-04-06
Packaged: 2018-10-15 03:26:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 34,298
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10549284
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/napricot/pseuds/napricot
Summary: Sam Wilson's fugitive life, post-Accords: taking refuge in a kingdom that might as well have been magical, in a sprawling palace set against beautiful mountains and jungles, where there was a handsome man cursed and trapped in a deathly sleep in a glass coffin, and a kind and just king who was working to heal him, and a stalwart warrior from a far-off time who wouldn't leave his cursed friend, and, hell, Sam even knew a witch. Surely Sam could be forgiven if his thoughts turned to fairy tales and Disney movies.Bucky's kind of like a Disney princess. Sam would maybe like to be Prince Charming.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Title from The National's "Thirsty."
> 
> Content warnings for vague depictions of PTSD and inaccurate and probably irresponsible medicinal use of a mystery psychoactive drug. Also, this is entirely self-indulgent and I make no apologies for that.

When Steve came to bust them out of the Raft, Sam’s first words were, “About damn time,” shortly followed by “what the fuck,” and then, “what the hell bullshit are we in for now?”

“Maybe we can finish escaping first?” Steve said, jaw going all tight, which meant they were in for serious additional bullshit.

But they exfil’d and got on a fancy jet piloted by a black woman Sam didn’t recognize, and didn’t even get shot at as they flew off, so whatever the additional bullshit was, it wasn’t immediate and Sam could relax at least a little bit. Once they were in the air, injuries attended to, Steve gave them a quick rundown of where the Avengers stood, which was, in short: still on the lam and broken up, but in King T’Challa’s better graces. And apparently, Stark had not ended up going to Siberia as a friend. Sam’s stomach dropped with a sick lurch as he realized that Barnes wasn’t with Steve.

“Where’s Barnes? Least the guy could do after the world’s most uncomfortable road trip is help bust us out of ocean superhero jail.” Steve crossed his arms, curled in on himself a little. His throat worked, but he didn’t say anything. Oh god, was Barnes dead? He couldn’t be, Sam was pretty sure Steve would be—well, more of a mess than he was looking like right now.

Lang’s eyes went wide and he blurted out, “Oh my god, is Sergeant Barnes dead?”

Clint elbowed him with the arm that wasn’t wrapped around Wanda. “For fuck’s sake, Lang, you can’t just ask someone if their BFF is dead,” he hissed.

Steve’s face did this horrifying sort of crumpling thing, halfway between a smile and a grimace. “No, not really!” he said, then covered his face with his hands, shoulders giving one brief jolt. Sam’s heart was pounding hard and panicked now. Sure, he wasn’t Barnes’ biggest fan, but he’d seen enough of the guy to want to see more. And during that airport fight, Barnes had had Sam’s back, unflinchingly, without question, putting his own supersoldiered ass on the line for him, and that counted for a lot with Sam.

He moved to the bench beside Steve, put a hand on his shoulder. “Steve. What happened to Barnes?”

Steve lifted his head from his hands, face mostly composed now. “Well, he’s down an arm again and he’s gone back into cryo. So—he’s, uh, not doing that great, I guess.”

“Explain,” said Wanda softly, eyes wide, and Steve did.

When Steve finished, Sam just felt sick and exhausted, all the adrenaline and fear of the escape draining out of him to leave nothing but guilt and vicious unhappiness. Shit, he’d told Stark where they were going, he’d set them up for that shit show in Siberia—Steve nudged him, none too gently.

“Sam. It’s not your fault. No way you could have known what Zemo’s plan was, how Tony’d react. I’m the one who should have told Tony about the Winter Soldier sooner.”

Lang frowned. “Okay, but Zemo’s plan was crazy.” Both Sam and Steve leveled _did we ask you?_ looks at Lang, though Steve’s was considerably more polite than Sam’s. Lang was undeterred. “How the hell could he have been sure about your interpersonal shit? If you had told Stark, or if Barnes had, Zemo would have just done something else. Like, it’s kind of like a con, if one angle of social engineering doesn’t work, you try another one. And given that his main goal was basically just to fuck up your lives, it wasn’t that complex.”

“What’s your point?” asked Clint, and Lang shrugged.

“I dunno. That it’s not really anyone’s fault, I guess. This mess is bigger than all of us.”

It was cold comfort, with Rhodes paralyzed and Barnes missing an arm and frozen. No matter what Steve or Lang said, those two parts of this mess were on Sam.

 

* * *

 

When they got to Wakanda, Sam spent the first 48 hours asleep, eating, or wandering around the palace grounds with a wonder he was a little embarrassed about. But, it was _Wakanda_. Every black kid grew up thinking of it like some kind of combination promised land and Disney World, the childhood dreams tempering into a more measured adult admiration, and maybe some resentment at Wakanda’s isolationism and reclusiveness. Actually walking around Wakanda, on the palace grounds no less, felt surreal. There was a thrill in blending in so thoroughly, in being the default for once, and with Wakanda’s advanced technology on discreet display nearly everywhere Sam looked, it felt like being in the future too.

They’d been given suites in a nook of the palace tucked away out of the main bustle, not far from the medical complex. The architecture and layout took some getting used to, arranged along lines and to aesthetic standards that were unfamiliar to Sam, who was used to the right angles and more rigid order of American institutional and military spaces. He spent a lot of time pleasantly lost while he explored the palace and its grounds.

Once he felt less like he was half asleep and wandering through a dreamscape, he set about trying to track T’Challa down. Sam may have been a lowly, common foreigner, but king or no king, he wanted to know what the deal was with T’Challa offering them sanctuary. Steve was busy working out how to get Clint and Lang back to their families, and Wanda was with some Wakandan shrinks or something, getting her powers more under control, which left Sam at loose ends to look for their royal host.

It turned out that getting a hold of the newly crowned king of Wakanda wasn’t a matter of just wandering around the palace until you found a throne room. Instead, it was a matter of wandering around until one of the king’s terrifying but hot guards noticed you and asked you if you were looking for something or someone in particular, or did you just enjoy aimlessly wandering the palace.

“I’d like to talk to the king, if possible,” Sam told the Dora Milaje, who inclined her head in acknowledgment but otherwise didn’t say anything. Wakandans, Sam had noticed, were polite but distant towards the strangers in their midst. He couldn’t entirely blame them given how Wakanda’s recent foray in the wider world had gone.

The king showed up when Sam was on his way back to his suite after visiting with Wanda, which was impressive, given that Sam was lost and had no idea _how_ to get back to his suite after visiting with Wanda. Not that Sam was gonna let it show.

“Good afternoon, Mr. Wilson.”

“Hi,” said Sam. One of the Dora Milaje looked faintly murderous. “Your Majesty. Your Highness? Listen, I’m not clear on the etiquette here.”

T’Challa’s solemn face gained some mirth. “That’s fine. I don’t think we need to stand on ceremony. I understand you wanted to speak with me.”

“Yeah. I was just wondering what you were planning on doing with your new collection of fugitive superheroes.”

“You have sanctuary here for as long as you need it. Wakanda was naive, regarding the implementation of the Accords, and you have all suffered for it. I wish to make amends for it, at least until the situation is resolved. I still believe the Avengers and those like them should be subject to some oversight. It is clear, however, that the form of that oversight must be scrutinized.”

“Fair enough. And Barnes? You were trying to kill him not that long ago.”

T’Challa nodded, a flicker of a wince passing over his face. “That was a grave error on my part, and a rush to judgment. I know he is innocent now. And I know the Winter Soldier’s crimes aren’t his doing either, no more than the gun is guilty of the murder committed by the one who pulls the trigger. What was done to him—it’s an obscenity. That Zemo took advantage of it is an obscenity.” T’Challa’s voice rang with conviction, and he was brimming with righteous anger, his hands clenched tight behind his back as they walked.

“Yeah. But he’s still a hell of a weapon to have. Or a bargaining chip.” Sam had to say it. Steve wouldn’t, couldn’t maybe, with how precarious their position was, but if they’d just exchanged one prison for a nicer one, Sam had to know. If Barnes was in for another round of being more weapon than person, they had to know.

“He is a person to whom I can offer healing and sanctuary, and that is what he will get. I have given Captain Rogers my word, as king and Black Panther, and I will give it to you as well. Barnes is safe here, no matter who comes for him. We will help him to the best of our ability.”

“How’s putting him in a freezer helping him?”

It came out angrier than Sam had intended, but he realized as he said it, that he _was_ angry about it. In the two years he’d spent helping Steve look for Barnes, he’d done a lot of staring at the Winter Soldier file, at its photo of a frozen Barnes, his face set in a mask of pain. He’d found the remains of a couple of the tanks in old abandoned HYDRA bases, had read the files on the cryostasis procedure. There was nothing healing about sticking Barnes in a cryostasis unit. He was a person, and they’d shoved him in a freezer to deal with later. Fuck. It wasn’t right.

T’Challa stopped, put a hand on Sam’s arm. His earlier anger had melted away, and his expression was compassionate now. “It’s what he chose. To ensure everyone else’s safety, until the HYDRA trigger words can be removed.”

Steve had said as much, but Sam wondered how much of a choice it was.

“Uh huh. And you just happened to have a cryostasis unit hanging around.”

T’Challa narrowed his eyes and whoops, looked like Sam had offended him. T’Challa visibly summoned his patience and said, “We use them in medical treatment. It required some modification for Barnes’ use, but I assure you, this is not like the kind of stasis he was placed in with HYDRA. You are welcome to visit him and see for yourself.”

 

* * *

 

Sam followed T’Challa’s directions to the medical suite set aside for Bucky, and found Steve already there in the bright and airy room. To Sam’s immediate relief, this room wasn’t anything close to the dark and industrial HYDRA bases Sam knew Barnes had been kept in. The medical suite had nearly a full wall of windows looking out into the capital’s lush greenery, and sunlight streamed in. The room was almost too bright, if anything, everything silvery and white. There were a handful of doctors or technicians bustling quietly around, and Steve was sitting in a chair by the cryostasis unit that held Barnes. Steve greeted Sam with a tired smile and a quiet “hey.”

He was almost afraid to get a glimpse of Barnes, anticipating the nightmarish quality of the Winter Soldier’s stasis, the unavoidable impression of a specimen in formaldehyde, or a body in a morgue. But the Wakandan cryostasis unit just looked like a piece of fancy medical technology, and Barnes looked like he was sleeping. The machine was tilted at a gentle angle, with Barnes strapped in to keep him on the gurney, and if Sam didn’t know better, he’d have thought it was some newfangled oxygen therapy tube or something. He stepped closer to get a proper look at Barnes, and thankfully, Barnes looked nothing like the image of the Winter Soldier in stasis from the files. He still had scrapes healing on his face, but his expression was calm and if not entirely untroubled, at least he didn’t look like he was in pain. He looked, actually, kind of glowy, what with the white clothes and the medical suite’s lighting.

Sam swallowed hard when he saw the missing space where Barnes’ left arm had been. Only the metal shoulder joint was still there, capped with some sort of covering. He knew it was Stark’s doing, knew he’d had no way of knowing how things would go down in Siberia, but guilt still churned in his gut at the sight. And it still didn’t sit right with Sam, keeping Barnes on ice, even if seeing the Wakandan cryo setup eased some of his reservations.

“They’re gonna wake him in a few weeks or so to take some scans and make sure he’s handling the stasis okay,” said Steve.

“Can he—I mean, is this like a coma, is he at least a little aware or—”

“No. He will be, a little, once they start warming him up again. They’re gonna see if they can’t encourage more healing in his brain that way. It’s—they explained everything to us, but, you know, it all kinda went over my head.”

Sam studied Steve. It had been a shitty few weeks for all of them, but Steve especially, what with Peggy Carter’s death and now Bucky in stasis indefinitely. The strain was showing. Steve’s eyes had that telltale puffiness from crying, and the unhappy furrow on his brow was starting to seem like a permanent fixture. Sam had never known Steve before the serum, but the set of his shoulders just now recollected a smaller, thinner Steve, always braced for life’s next blow. Sam practically ached with sympathetic tension.

“You planning on just hanging out here until he’s thawed out? I don’t know him that well, but I feel like he’d call bullshit on that.”

Steve sighed. “Yeah, he would. I just don’t want to leave him.”

“C’mon. You eat yet? Let’s go try some more Wakandan food.”

“Yeah. Yeah, okay.”

 

* * *

 

Two nights of shitty, nightmare-riddled sleep later, Sam was starting to see the appeal of just goddamn getting in a freezer tube for some rest. He gave up on tossing and turning sometime around three am, and set out into the halls of the palace, hoping the movement and new surroundings would quiet his mind, would distract from the jumbled mess of Riley blasted out of the sky and Rhodey falling. The halls were quiet of any human sound, but the jungle’s lively night encroached through the wide windows and open air hallways with the chirping of insects. The near-seamless melding of the urban and natural worlds in Wakanda kept catching Sam by surprise, and he was always half-expecting to run into a jaguar or something when he turned a corner to be faced with a verdant burst of jungle.

Sam wandered the dimly lit hallways, with no particular destination in mind, and ended up in Barnes’ medical suite. The lights here were soft and dim too, save for the on-duty nurse or technician’s alcove. Sam wasn’t too surprised to spot Steve sitting on an exam table near the cryostasis unit, staring at Barnes.

“Steve—” started Sam, but Steve cut him off with a wince.

“I know, I know. I just—couldn’t sleep.” Sam sighed and sat next to Steve on the exam table. Steve nudged his knee and gave him a sidelong look. “You’re here too.”

“Yeah. Couldn’t sleep either.”

They both stared at Barnes, who of course hadn’t moved since the last time Sam had been here. His chest didn’t even rise and fall, and that was downright eerie when contrasted with his pale but not bloodless face, so Sam focused on Barnes’ face instead. Sam didn’t know what Steve saw, when he sat here staring at his best friend’s sleeping face. Sam just saw a scruffy, tired guy. A good-looking scruffy, tired guy, Sam allowed.

Back before he’d ever had any idea he’d end up meeting the man, when Bucky Barnes had been just one more dead soldier who’d made the history books, Sam had thought Barnes was a good-looking guy. He was no Gabe Jones, who Sam had spent a not insignificant amount of his childhood wanting to be, but he was handsome, had a vaguely brooding appeal that contrasted with his overachiever pre-war days in an appealing way. He was still handsome, if Sam was being honest with himself. Even if the hair was unfortunate. Sam frowned, considering it. Was cryo bad for hair? Would it, like, snap off when it was frozen? Who knew. Barnes could use a haircut anyway. Though his hair had looked improbably good, when they’d been running after the spider kid in the Leipzig airport. Even mid-battle, some tiny, unhelpful corner of Sam’s mind not engaged in any actually useful observations had thought, “this is some Pantene commercial level shit right here” as Barnes’ hair had flowed in the wind.

Sam blinked, shook himself a little. Shit, he was loopy if he was contemplating the state of Barnes’ hair. He stole a glance at Steve. Steve looked sad and resolute, noble. Even if he was letting a sadness beard grow in. Steve probably wasn’t thinking of anything so stupid as Barnes’ hair. He was probably thinking about something useful, like how they could help Barnes get rid of those horrifying trigger words. That was well beyond Sam’s limited professional experience. A shadow of a glimmer stirred in Sam’s sleep-deprived mind, a thought he felt like he needed to follow, something about a reference to an old file he’d run into while searching for Barnes—but it was gone before Sam could even think of grasping it. He was almost dozing now, listing against Steve who obligingly shifted and put an arm around him.

Trigger words, christ, it was basically a curse, and here Barnes was in this unnatural sleep, this pseudo-death, under glass, like, like goddamn Snow White, and there it was again, that thing he half-knew, had seen in passing—he shuddered and jerked, with one of those full-body jerks that was like your half-asleep brain zapping you with a cattle prod, and then he was fully awake again.

“Alright?” asked Steve, voice low as if trying not to puncture the quiet.

Sam ran a hand over his face. “Yeah. Yeah, almost fell asleep is all.”

“Go back to bed, Sam,” said Steve, but neither of them moved to leave, and dawn found them sleeping sprawled against each other on the hard exam table. They both woke groggily as the room filled with light, a morning shift nurse looking at them with concern and maybe pity. They shuffled out of the medical suite with muttered excuses, and Sam looked at Barnes again, some irrational part of him hoping for a change in his expression or position, like he really was just asleep instead of frozen. But the only thing that had changed was the pale morning light, splintering and refracting where it bounced against the dusting of frost on the glass of the chamber.

 

* * *

 

Sam ended up back in the medical suite with Barnes a few more times that week. Partly it was that he knew Steve would be there too, if he was restless and sleepless like Sam was. And he was, more often than not. There was the quality of a vigil about it, and Steve particularly had something of the posture of a penitent in a church pew. Sam himself was too guilt-ridden to chide Steve for it, even as he knew they were neither of them doing themselves any favors.

“We can never tell him we did this, it’s pathetic,” said Sam one night. “Normal people who can’t sleep, like, watch late night tv or infomercials, or lie in the dark staring into the void. We’re sitting here staring at your frozen best friend, Steve.”

Steve huffed out a laugh. “Yeah, definitely don’t tell him we did this.”

“What, would he ream you out for it?” Sam could see that. Steve had shared plenty of stories of Barnes giving him shit for his recklessness or crazy plans.

“I wish. Not for something like this. For this, he’d just—get all serious, and earnest, and make these big, sad eyes at me, and say something stupidly right and perfect.” Steve’s face crumpled a little at some memory and he put his face in his hands for a moment. “God, I—I keep failing him, I keep fucking it up.”

“This isn’t on you,” Sam told him, and put a hopefully comforting hand on his shoulder. Lang had gotten it right, after they’d busted out of the Raft. This mess was bigger than all of them. That didn’t seem to do much to keep any of them from holding onto the parts of that mess that belonged to them though.

Sam wasn’t only haunting Barnes’ medical suite to keep Steve company. Alone in his room, his thoughts circled the gravity well in his head that was his time on the Raft, that was watching Rhodey plummet to the ground, that was wondering if there was something he could have done to keep the shit from hitting the fan in Lagos. At least if he went to the medical suite, those unwelcome thoughts were replaced instead with an urge like he’d forgotten to turn the oven off, a niggling half-thought that sent him pacing back and forth in front of Barnes’ cryochamber. He could have sworn he’d thought of something important, that first night he’d drifted off here, but he couldn’t chase it down. He just kept thinking: _Snow White_. _Sleeping Beauty._ He’d start drifting off on the exam table, where a faintly disapproving Wakandan nurse had eventually taken to leaving a pillow for him and Steve, and his mind would turn to hazy childhood memories of fairy tales while he blinked drowsily at Barnes.

Fully awake Sam thought this was some bullshit. Barnes was no cursed princess, he was just a tired, hurting soldier who wanted to be free of the HYDRA horrors hidden in his own mind. Half-asleep, insomnia-riddled Sam looked at Barnes and thought _glass coffin_ and _cursed words_ and _someone’s gotta break the curse_. Half-asleep Sam ended up thinking, _he really is pretty handsome under that stubble_ and _his eyelashes are nice_ and _his lips look soft and sad_ and suddenly Sam had a real personal understanding of why those creepy Prince Charmings had fallen for goddamn unconscious women. Sam had at least known Barnes when he was awake and sassing him with unnecessary comments like _you couldn’t have done that earlier_?

He tried to distract himself with the real, actual royalty whose palace he was living in, but no joy. He really only saw T’Challa in passing, and his sister Shuri, the literal princess of Wakanda, was away studying at university and training to be the next Black Panther now that T’Challa was king. The queen mother, still in mourning, kept to herself, and Sam hadn’t even seen her. There wasn’t even any juicy royal family gossip, which tabloids and assorted period pieces had led Sam to believe existed in all monarchies, or if there was, it was opaque to foreign outsiders. All in all, Sam’s experience of the Wakandan royal palace was like a combination of an exceptionally pretty government building and some astonishingly expensive and discreet hotel/rehab facility. It wasn’t exactly like any of Sam’s wild childhood imaginings of Wakanda, even if it was still plenty futuristic and impressive.

_You’re just too Disney-damaged, Wilson_ , he told himself in the small hours of yet another sleepless night. He’d watched way too many Disney movies, way too many times with his sisters, and that shit stuck with a man. Sam’s life had taken a decided turn for the strange from the moment he’d met Captain America and assorted other superheroes, but strip all the crazy, over the top shit away, and the contours of Sam’s Avenging life still fit within the bounds of a story he could fit in the normal, everyday world. He knew, because he’d been able to explain it to his mom that way. _Yeah, superheroes, crazy, I know, but really, Mom, it’s not that different from pararescue._ This though—this kept slipping past the bounds of an understandable if exciting life. This was a kingdom that might as well have been magical, and a sprawling palace set against beautiful mountains and jungles, and a handsome man cursed and trapped in a deathly sleep, and a kind and just king who was working to heal him, and a stalwart warrior from a far-off time who wouldn't leave his friend, and, hell, Sam even knew a witch. Surely Sam could be forgiven if his thoughts turned to fairy tales and Disney movies.

He could never quite settle on where he fit into the story though. Comic relief? Nah, that had to be Lang. The sidekick? Sam had a healthy ego, and wasn’t really willing to settle for that, no matter how much room Steve took up in his life. He definitely wasn’t the villain. Which left being the prince, a prospect that made sleep-deprived Sam have increasingly serious thoughts about attempting true love’s kiss or finding a dragon to kill somewhere, or maybe a sorcerer to defeat. He might even have muttered some sleepy things about needing a sword and his wings at one point.

Finally, when he was coming up on the second full week of passing out on the hard exam table in the small hours of the night and walking around groggy and cranky during the day, one of the Wakandan doctors approached him.

“If you need something to help you sleep, please, allow us to assist you.”

A reflexive denial almost made it out of his mouth: he was fine, it was fine, it would pass. It always did. But it was nearly two full weeks now of barely getting four hours a night, and his brains felt like they’d been scooped out and replaced with sand and stuffing. Fuck, he needed a full night’s sleep.

“Yeah. Sure, that’d be great. Thanks.”

He took the pills that the doctor offered, and that night he slept long and dreamless, and didn’t wake until nearly noon.

 

* * *

 

Steve, the idiot, was still spending his sleepless nights in silent vigil over Barnes, a possibility that Barnes had apparently foreseen, because he’d left a letter for Steve that he’d directed the medical staff to give to Steve when “he’s spent too long moping and brooding,” which point the staff determined Steve had reached around week three of the whole mournful staring at Barnes and growing a sadness beard situation. Steve pitched a hilarious if small shit fit over it, which was honestly preferable to the eyebrow furrow of sadness, so that was probably mission accomplished for Barnes, whether Steve read the letter or not. Steve did read the letter though, once he’d finished pointlessly glaring at Barnes in his cryochamber. For a second, Sam worried the letter was something akin to a suicide note, or the BFF equivalent of a dear John letter. He needn’t have worried; the second Steve read it, he laughed, expression caught somewhere between affection and annoyance.

“You’re such a jerk, Bucky,” Steve muttered with a shaky grin, then pulled another sheet of paper from the envelope. “This one’s for you.”

Sam hadn’t expected that. But there it was, in neat and almost pretty handwriting, on the folded over flap of the paper: _For Wilson_. 

_Dear Sam,_

_I’m not sure when I’ll see you again, or if I will, so I figured I’d write all this down. I’m not so great with talking anymore anyway, so this is probably for the best._

Well, that “if” was a little worrying. But Sam supposed Barnes had gone under not knowing where Sam would end up after getting busted from the Raft, so he tried not to read too much into it.

_I didn’t get a chance to properly say it earlier, but I’m sorry about all the times I attacked you, and I’m sorry about breaking your wings on the helicarrier. I won’t make any excuses for it, we both know why it happened. I don’t expect or need you to forgive me. Just wanted to say I am sorry, and I’m doing what I can to make sure it doesn’t happen again._

Sam blinked down at the letter. Barnes had already offered a quick apology on the drive to the airport, and Sam had brushed him off with some flippant comment, too distracted to do much else. He might have given Barnes some shit about it, but he hadn’t, in all honesty, particularly thought Barnes needed to apologize beyond that, not for being brainwashed or triggered anyway. If there was anything he should apologize for, it was for leading Sam on a merry chase around the better part of the globe looking for him.

_Sorry you spent so much time looking for me too. In the interest of honesty, I’m not really sorry you didn’t find me, but I am sorry to have wasted your time. It was a good effort! You got real close in Belgrade._

Sam lifted his gaze from the letter to glare at the peacefully frozen Barnes in front of him. _You passive aggressive asshole_ , he thought.

“A good effort…I’ll show you a good effort, Barnes….”

_I also wanted to thank you, for being a friend to Steve, and for having my back through this mess with Zemo and the Accords when you had no reason to. I’m sorry things turned out so shitty. I’m saying sorry a lot, I know. There’s a lot to be sorry for._

_I hope you aren’t, though. Feeling sorry, that is. Before things went to shit, Stark mentioned that you’d told him where we were. What happened after that isn’t on you. What happened to Colonel Rhodes isn’t on you either. You did what you thought was right. I know Steve’ll tell you the same thing._

_Take care of yourself._

_Yours,_

_Bucky_

Here was some small bit of absolution from an unexpected corner, written out in Barnes’—Bucky’s—neat, old-fashioned penmanship. Sam’s eyes burned and his throat went tight. It was the unlooked for kindness of the letter that got to him, the thought that even as Bucky had surely had more than enough on his mind, and more than enough to worry about, he’d taken the time to offer Sam what comfort he could. _Goddammit_ , he thought, and rubbed hard at his eyes. It helped more than he wanted to admit to know that Bucky wasn’t upset with him over what went down in Siberia, and Sam’s own role in enabling that mess.

And signing off with _Yours, Bucky_ ….maybe that was just habit, but it felt a little like an overture of friendship, a little like a request. No one but Steve called him Bucky.

“Alright, Sam?” asked Steve, a knowing sort of look in his eyes.

“I think this is the letter equivalent of your boy getting all serious and earnest with the big, sad eyes at me,” joked Sam.

Steve smiled, soft and sad. “Yeah, he was really worried about all of you on the Raft. Would’ve come to help break you out, but—you know.”

“I’m sure he can still kick ass even down an arm, but probably best not to go running straight into another fight.”

“It wasn’t that,” said Steve, shaking his head. “He’s—the trigger words. They really—that really messed with him. He said it was safest for everyone if he stayed on ice until we could get them out.”

_I’m doing what I can to make sure it doesn’t happen again_ , Bucky had written. And fuck, that hurt. Sam understood why Bucky saw this as his best option, but it still didn’t feel right, or fair.

“We’ll figure it out, Steve.”

 

* * *

 

A month after that damned conference in Vienna, things had quieted down enough that Steve and T’Challa could send feelers out about the status of the Avengers and the Accords. That was all above Sam’s (non-existent, at this point) pay grade, so Sam mostly hung out with Wanda, Clint, and Lang as they all leveled out after their brief but astonishingly shitty stay on the Raft. It could have been worse than a few beatings and some light “enhanced interrogation,” Sam knew, and Sam had done his SERE training, okay, he could handle it. Still, it took time to unwind. Getting a few full nights of sleep helped.

He was just starting to feel antsy with the lack of activity when Steve called a meeting of the fugitive Avengers.

“I’ve gotten word from Natasha. She’s with Fury, and they have some information for us, and some messages from Tony and Maria Hill. Turns out, and I’m sure you’ll all find this surprising, the Accords weren’t entirely on the up and up.”

“Gee, who’d’ve thunk it, what with the secret ocean supermax for the superpowered, all shiny and new and ready to go the second the Accords were signed,” said Clint. They all shared a grim smile of agreement.

“None of you are obligated to stay here,” Steve continued. “T’Challa has very kindly offered to house us here until we get to the bottom of what General Ross is up to, and deal with the Accords. But I gave up the shield, and I don’t intend to take it back up. What we do from here on out, it’s not official, and it’s not sanctioned by the UN or what’s left of the Avengers Initiative. If you want out, you can meet up with Natasha in Cairo and she’ll get you out. Clint, I know you’re already planning to head back to your family.”

“Yeah. Door’s open for anyone who wants to come with.”

They all considered it. Lang was the first to speak up. “You’re working on taking down Ross, or just the Accords?”

“Mostly Ross. T’Challa and Tony are working on reconfiguring the Accords into something less--”

“Fascist?” suggested Sam dryly.

Steve nodded. “Yeah. And of course, I’m here for personal reasons too. I’m staying in Wakanda until we figure out how to help Bucky.”

“You gonna need anyone to do some thieving?” asked Lang. Steve blinked at him, shifted a little uncomfortably in his chair.

“Uh, probably.”

Lang nodded. “I’ll stay.”

Wanda was twisting her sleeves with her fingers, frowning down at the table. “So will I.”

“Wanda—” started Clint, and reached for her hand.

“I want to stay, I want to help. The Accords, Ross—they want to control people like me. They’re afraid of me. I can’t hide, I can’t pretend—” she broke off, shook her head. “I’m staying.”

“Okay,” said Steve smiling at her. “Thank you.”

“Steve, you know I’m staying, man,” said Sam.

There wasn’t even really a question in Sam’s mind. They weren’t done yet. He’d gotten into this to take out HYDRA, to find Barnes, and yeah, that work was kind of done. But it also kind of wasn’t. They’d found Bucky, they’d brought him to a safe place, but they hadn’t brought Bucky _home_ yet. They hadn’t fully freed him from HYDRA. And now there were Ross and the Accords to deal with too. He’d been on the Raft, and he’d had plenty of time to think long and hard about all the other empty cells, about who could, and undoubtedly would, be put in them. If Sam could do anything to stop that, he had to. Plus, someone had to keep an eye on Steve.

“Sam, are you sure? You can go back with Natasha, work with her and Maria on this from the States. Or you can leave it all. You were doing good work with the VA, important work.”

Sam met Steve’s eyes, as steady and determined as he could. “I know. But I want to stay. I want to see this through.”

Steve gave him a grateful smile, and looked at the rest of the team. “Alright. Thank you, all of you. Let’s get started.”

 

* * *

 

Sam ended up going with Clint to Cairo to meet up with Natasha. With fanny packs and big sunglasses, they blended in easily enough among the throngs of tourists, and neither Sam’s Wakandan papers nor Clint’s forgeries had raised any eyebrows.

When Natasha found them milling among the crowds at Khan el-Khalili, Sam startled, scarcely recognizing her. She was wearing a headscarf, her face plain and bare of any makeup, and she moved like a local who just wanted to get through the crowds of sightseers. Clint swiftly ditched the glasses and fanny pack, and threw on the clothes Natasha shoved at him, and in a minute’s time, Clint blended in too.

Natasha pressed in close against Sam, the closest thing she was willing to risk to a hug.

“Doing okay?” she asked.

“Yeah. You?”

“Yeah.” She passed over a bag. “The book with Barnes’ trigger words in it. And Barnes’ own notebooks, plus some intel Maria and Nick sent along.”

“Thanks. We miss you, Nat,” said Sam, because it was true. She smiled up at him.

“We’ll get this all worked out,” she said, low and fervent, and Sam looked at her set and determined face, and believed her. She gave his hand a warm, hard squeeze, and then she and Clint walked away, unrecognizable in the crowd within seconds.

 

* * *

 

On the plane back to Wakanda, Sam took a look at what Natasha had given him. There were a couple of encrypted drives, and a burner phone. Apart from that, it was just the promised book with the trigger words, and Bucky’s notebooks, Bucky’s only real personal effects. Steve had more or less begged Natasha to get them back apparently, and she’d come through with Sharon Carter’s help, even wiping all evidence of them from the investigation.

The book with the trigger words had been the more pressing concern though, and Sam pulled it out to look at it. It was a battered and innocuous thing, until you opened it. Then it was revealed to be a stomach-churning manual of use and maintenance for the Winter Soldier. Sam couldn’t read a lot of the Cyrillic and German, but there were diagrams too, and what he could read was bad enough. He set it aside. The Wakandan doctors and scientists would have to see what they could glean from it.

Sam hesitated before touching Bucky’s notebooks. These were definitely, definitely private. Sam didn’t know if they were journals or just how Bucky had kept track of his memories, but either way, private. There were a dozen of them, some more well-thumbed than others, some stuffed thick with clippings. From the outside, they didn’t look too dissimilar from the average planner of a moderately well-organized person. There were even color-coded sticky notes poking out of the pages.

_Don’t look in them, Wilson_ , he told himself. _Respect the man’s privacy_. He stared at them some more. Just normal moleskines, plain black mostly, a few dark blue ones. The sticky notes were red and blue and green. He wondered what they represented. He wondered if Natasha had read them. She was a spy, she probably had.

Okay, he’d just take a quick look. Just, you know, a page or two, make sure they were the real deal. He was sure he’d recognize Bucky’s handwriting from the letter, that fussy, old-fashioned penmanship a clear giveaway. He looked around the plane, as if someone was going to catch him at this, and opened up one of the notebooks at random. It was, indeed, Bucky’s handwriting, English letters even, but Sam couldn’t make sense of it. It was encoded and ciphered, and Sam didn’t have the key. He opened another one: this one was unlined, full of sketches and drawings, maps and schematics. Bucky didn’t have Steve’s skill, but they were competent drawings, something of a draftsman’s hand in them. They didn’t mean anything to Sam, and he set this notebook aside too.

_Okay, one more, and I’ll stop_ , Sam told himself. The contents of the next notebook he opened up, one of the blue ones, looked a lot like the lists he’d seen Steve keeping of modern stuff to google or check out later, though Bucky’s seemed decidedly tilted towards history rather than pop culture. Sam reasoned to himself that this notebook wasn’t so private, really, it being more or less a series of to-do lists of terms to look up. It was mostly boring at first, all _Berlin wall_ and _glasnost_ and _Korean War_ , like a study guide for a high school history class. There were a few terms in other languages, and he could chart Bucky’s progress across Europe that way, and goddammit, he really _had_ gotten close in Belgrade a year ago.

Midway through this notebook, personality started seeping through. Bucky’d started making little notes on what he looked up instead of just checking things off. _Lord of the Rings - familiar? I read something like this_ and then in a different color ink, like he’d come back to it later, _The Hobbit: read to Ruthie and Ella. Steve drew dragon._ _Movies!!!!_ Sam smiled a little at that. There were a whole two pages of various food items that Bucky provided his brief opinions on, in neat rows and columns. _What a dork_ , thought Sam, but noted that Bucky had a sweet tooth for fresh fruit and chocolate.

He could tell when Bucky had gone on a science kick, because there were just pages and pages of scientific and technological advancements to look up, which confirmed that Bucky was a giant fucking nerd. Bucky must have had access to a library and/or wikipedia, because it seemed like he’d read voraciously, about anything and everything, book titles branching off from the things he wanted to look up. It made Sam feel better to know that Bucky hadn’t spent all of his time on the run just surviving and hiding. He’d found some small joy in something untainted by HYDRA, in rediscovering the world.

And shit, it looked like he was _really_ into space. Sam was horribly charmed by the obvious excitement here as Bucky evidently learned about the space program and NASA for the first time. _WE’VE BEEN TO THE MOON HOLY SHIT_ and then what must have been later, in the margins, _AND MARS!!!!!_ _With robots!!!!_ Goddamn, it was _adorable_. Sam wanted to get Bucky out of cryo right the fuck now and watch Apollo 13 with him, or take him to an observatory, and watch him get this excited so he could make fun of how much of a nerd he was.

The rest of that notebook was more of the same, Bucky eventually moving on to some pop culture and music, though it didn’t look like he’d gotten very far. Maybe he’d continued in another notebook. Sam flipped through another, but with one look, he could tell this was one of the notebooks he 100% should not have looked at. Bucky’s usually neat handwriting was a messy, borderline illegible scrawl, and gone were the ordered lists and careful check marks, instead just line after line of frantic words. _It’s not a nightmare it’s not a nightmare it happened it happened it happened and it was me it was always me_ ….Sam slammed that notebook shut. He left the rest of them alone.

 

* * *

 

When he got back to the palace, he dropped off the drives and notebooks with Steve, and took the book with the trigger words in it straight to Bucky’s medical suite, where the Wakandan doctors would keep it under extremely high tech lock and key. Sam lingered after dropping off the book, studying Bucky, as still and silent as ever in the cryochamber.

“We will be waking him next week. We’ve started the gradual warming process already,” said one of the doctors.

“Dr. Njue, right?”

She was head of the small team working to help Bucky, some sort of expert in neuropsychiatry. She was kind of intimidating: polite and reserved like most of the Wakandans Sam had met, with a distant look in her eyes like she was always thinking of something way more interesting and important than talking to you. Sam tried not to take it personally.

She nodded. “You had good timing bringing the book to us.”

“Gradual warming, huh? Is he gonna start being more—” _alive_ Sam wanted to say, and settled for a vague gesture instead.

“Yes, though you needn’t set up vigil. This is part of what we use these devices for on un-enhanced humans: to initiate and sustain something like a medical coma to induce healing of neural tissues. Sergeant Barnes’ brain has undergone a great deal of trauma, both psychic and physical, and he’s done remarkably well, considering. That serum of his does much. But we are hopeful that if we can heal more, it will give us a firmer foundation before undertaking any attempts to deprogram the trigger words.”

“And when you wake him up, it’ll be—it’s safe, right? The process, I mean? I’m sorry, I know you’ve probably talked to Steve about all this, and it’s not really any of my business—”

Dr. Njue smiled, and it transformed her angular face into something much brighter and kinder. “I do not mind. It is good Sergeant Barnes has those who care about him. Social support is critical for recovery.”

Sam smiled back at her, relieved. Yeah, that was him. Social support. He definitely wasn’t just a creeper who spent sleepless nights staring at Bucky’s face a lot thinking it was a stupid, handsome face! He definitely hadn’t read Bucky’s very private journals! He was just here for support, socially speaking. _Fuck_.

Dr. Njue continued, unaware of Sam’s mini crisis, “It’s safe. He will wake as if from a deep sleep. He will still need warming up, and he won’t be up and about right away, but he will be fine within a couple of hours.”

“That’s good. Thanks.”

 

* * *

 

Sam tried to play it cool when it came time for Bucky to be revived, telling Steve to let him know when Bucky was feeling up to it, and he’d come by to visit. It was probably for the best if Steve was the one there when Bucky first woke, and then they could spend some time alone together. It meant Sam had a few hours to kill trying to keep himself busy enough to not obsess over this, but not so busy he wouldn’t be able to drop everything to go see Bucky. He had some vague idea that if he could just see an awake, verbal Bucky Barnes, he could get a handle on this whole unfortunate feelings situation after having been sufficiently reminded that the guy was kind of a pain in the ass.

It didn’t work out that way.

He walked into the medical suite, which was flooded with bright sunlight this time of the late morning, and was greeted with the sight of Bucky Barnes, dressed all in white and smiling gently at something Steve was saying. He was, horror of horrors, freshly shaven, the lingering scrapes and bruises from the fight with Stark healed, and Sam had been right. He was really handsome under the scruff. Also, maybe this was just the sunshine and all the shiny metal everywhere talking, but Bucky was fairly surrounded by some bullshit halo of light and his hair looked really soft, so it had evidently made it out of cryo alright, and maybe those sparkles were just the light reflecting off the metal of his left shoulder joint, but it was just—a lot. It was a lot, and it was not helping that crazed part of Sam's mind that had Snow White and Sleeping Beauty style thoughts about Bucky goddamn Barnes. _You are not Prince Charming, Wilson_. _This is not a fairy tale,_ he told himself. _Get it together._

Steve noticed him at the door and turned to him with a smile and a “Hey, Sam!” so Sam came closer as Bucky faced him too, and oh no. No. Sam was not prepared for the exceedingly pretty, bright blue-gray of Bucky’s eyes. All that time spent staring at this stupid frozen face, and Sam hadn’t built up any immunity to this particular sight, which was what he blamed what he said next on.

“Hey Bucky, welcome back to the land of the living!” he said, like a normal person, only to follow it up with, “Those steel blue eyes are a real welcome sight.” Steve and Bucky just blinked at him, politely bewildered. _Smooth, Wilson. Real smooth. What the fuck are you thinking?_ “How’re you feeling?”

“Alright,” said Bucky, his voice a hoarse and barely audible rasp that suggested otherwise.

Steve and Bucky both winced to hear it, and Steve ran a hand up and down Bucky’s back. “Takes a few hours for his voice to recover from cryo, apparently. The cold’s not so great for vocal chords,” said Steve.

“That what you meant when you said you’re not so great at talking anymore in your letter?” Sam teased, even as the crazy apparently Disney-obsessed part of his mind whispered, _he’s missing his voice! The Little Mermaid!_ Bucky gave him a crooked smile and shrugged, the movement unbalanced with the current absence of his left arm. “Just had to include some shit talking though, didn’t you. Got real close in Belgrade, my ass. I’d’ve had you if not for that stupid parade.” Bucky grinned a little and shook his head, raised eyebrows clearly communicating, _bullshit_.

One of the nurses brought over a mug of hot, honeyed tea for Bucky, and Steve and Sam went back and forth updating Bucky on what he’d missed, while Bucky sipped at his tea and listened. He was only going to be out of cryo for a couple days while the doctors monitored him for any unwelcome side effects from cryostasis and got full scans of his brain in action. It didn’t seem like much time at all.

By the time Bucky finished his tea, his voice had returned, though he still spoke soft and low. “You okay?”

“Me?” asked Sam, confused, and Bucky nodded. “I’m fine, more than. Why d’you ask?”

“The Raft,” answered Bucky, and tilted his head to study Sam with, goddammit, the wide and sincere eyes that Steve had alluded to. Sam recalled that to Bucky, it had only been a few days since they’d been arrested and Steve had started to plan their breakout. He’d have gone under not knowing how that had shaken out. Hence the stupidly big blue eyes of concern. Who the fuck could resist this bullshit? About five dozen different tender and conflicted and angry feelings raised a clamor in Sam’s heart.

“I’m fine. A little banged up, a few nights of shitty sleep since, but I’m okay. Had worse in SERE training.” Bucky nodded, clearly relieved. Sam was underplaying it, maybe, but he wasn’t gonna complain about a week of imprisonment to the longest-held POW in history. “Hey, thanks for asking,” said Sam.

“I’m glad you stayed in Wakanda,” said Bucky, which made Sam immediately go kind of mushy and sweet inside, but then Bucky followed it up with, “I know that must be difficult for you, on account of all the cats, and your whole birdman situation.”

Sam glared at him, but he laughed too, and oh goddammit, Sam liked Bucky, pain in the ass and all.

 

* * *

 

Steve stayed glued to Bucky’s side while Bucky was out of cryo, which Sam couldn’t really fault him for, even if privately he thought Bucky might want some space. Sam just hung out with them for meals, which was kind of depressing what with Bucky being limited to soft foods and liquids on account of him going under again so soon. Sam had sort of wanted to watch him try some of Wakanda’s new-to-him native fruits.

Bucky’s whole situation was well beyond anything Sam was equipped to handle as a peer counselor, but as far as he could tell, Bucky was at least doing okay, considering the circumstances. He was pretty quiet and withdrawn, but not being on the run had taken some of the defensive hunch out of his shoulders, and some intangible thing between Steve and Bucky had eased, something that had been out of sync between them since finding Bucky in Bucharest had snapped back into place.

Sam might have been wary and distrustful of Bucky back in Berlin, but it turned out that when you met a person while they were shit terrified for not just their life, but their hard-won sense of self too, they weren’t exactly at their best. Now that he’d spent some time with Bucky in somewhat less stressful situations, and had, y’know, stared at his face a lot and read his diaries, the contrast between the Winter Soldier and Bucky was stark, almost sickeningly so. Sam didn’t have to wonder, _is this guy more Winter Soldier than Bucky Barnes_ like he had again and again since looking for and then finding Bucky. One look at Bucky and his tired, kind eyes gave him the answer.

Which was part of why it felt like such an unwelcome shock to have Bucky going back in cryo again after a couple days.

“I know it’s not really my business, but you sure this is the best option?” asked Sam as Bucky was preparing to go back in stasis. “We’ve got the book, there’s not much chance of anyone triggering you in this highly secure royal palace.”

Bucky’s face went distant and still, and with perfect, awful calm, he said, “I can’t stand knowing all it takes is ten words to unmake me, and it is selfish and irresponsible to risk hurting anyone else.” His calm cracked a little, and disgust and guilt flickered across his face. “I shouldn’t have risked it before.”

Steve flinched. “You didn’t know,” he said.

Bucky looked at him, steady and unwavering. “Doesn’t matter. I knew I was dangerous.”

“You’re a person, not a weapon, Buck,” said Steve.

“I’m a person _and_ a weapon, Steve,” he said, gentle now. “Can’t pretend otherwise. I have to do everything I can to make sure that if I’m gonna be a weapon, I’m not one anyone can use without my say.”

“Okay.” Steve folded his arms tight over his chest “And this isn’t you choosing the closest thing you can to dying so you don’t upset me? This isn’t you checking out because things are too hard?” _Whoa_ , thought Sam. Steve’s jaw was clenched like he was gunning for a fight.

Bucky narrowed his eyes. “World don’t revolve around _you_ , Rogers. And I’m not _checking out_. If I’d wanted to die, I’d have put a bullet in my head already. Would’ve been the best option, maybe, all things considered,” he said, wry and dark, and Sam and Steve both opened their mouths to make automatic denials, but Bucky kept going. “But I guess I’m just committed to surviving at this point. I’m selfish like that. And anyway, I don’t think I’m the one with a death wish.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Steve demanded.

Okay, this was all getting pretty intense. Sam thought Steve and Bucky had smoothed things over between them, but apparently not. This had all the makings of a blowout fight. Sam exchanged an awkward, _well this is happening_ sort of glance with Dr. Njue, who was checking the cryostasis unit.

“It means you’ve been throwing yourself in every single goddamn dangerous war you can, like it doesn’t matter if you live or die, since 19-fucking-42. Two weeks out of the ice, and you threw yourself into another war. Did you ever even stop to think that you’d done enough, you’d died once already, you could leave the shield behind? How much do you have to give up before you decide it’s enough, you can have a damned life now?”

Some of the fight seemed to leave Steve. “I’m done with that now, I let the shield go. No more Captain America.”

“Still fighting though.”

“You’re not the only one who’s a weapon, Buck,” said Steve with a tight, tired smile. He swallowed hard, looked down. “And you know what I won’t give up.”

As if it was a signal, all the tension drained away between them, and Bucky tugged Steve in for a hug, whispered something in his ear that Steve nodded at, burying his face against Bucky’s neck. They hung on to each other for a long moment.

Dr. Njue politely cleared her throat. “We’re ready, Sergeant Barnes.”

Steve pulled back, eyes a little watery and red. He smoothed Bucky’s hair back behind his ears, which made Bucky wrinkle his nose at Steve, and they smiled at each other before Bucky stepped over to the cryostasis unit.

“Neither of you do anything too stupid ‘till I get back,” said Bucky with one last half-smile. He took a deep breath and got in the chamber, and by the time he closed his eyes and exhaled, the frost of stasis had crystallized on the chamber’s glass, and he didn’t take another breath in.

Every single one of Sam’s medic instincts screamed that this was wrong, that he had to get Bucky out of there and that it was time to administer CPR, because he wasn’t breathing—but Dr. Njue was right there, calmly checking readings, and Bucky was lying there as peaceful and untroubled as if he were taking a nap. Bucky was fine, for certain values of fine. Sam tore his attention away from Bucky, and looked at Steve.

“Maybe don’t start a fight with your bestie right before he gets frozen?” Because seriously, _timing_.

Steve frowned at him. “That wasn’t a fight.” Sam boggled. “What, it wasn’t! I call him on his shit, he calls me on mine. That’s how it works.”

Well damn, and here Sam thought he’d called Steve out on his shit from time to time too, but clearly, he’d just been engaging in gentle love taps compared to the swift bout of bare-knuckle boxing he’d just witnessed. These two did not pull their physical or metaphorical punches with each other, apparently.

“Alright, if you say so,” said Sam.

 

* * *

 

Now that Bucky’s medical team had the book with the trigger words, and a lot of scans of Bucky’s brain, they were able to start looking for a fix for the triggers in earnest. Steve and Sam were called in for a meeting with Dr. Njue’s team to go over any relevant information they might have from their experience with HYDRA bases and the intelligence they’d gathered on the Winter Soldier program. The second both of them caught sight of Dr. Njue’s stern and forbidding face, their shoulders took on the hunch of students expecting a scolding. Sam felt a little like he’d forgotten to turn in a paper. Dr. Njue noticed it, and winced apologetically.

“Forgive me, I don’t mean to seem upset with you. This has proven to be—difficult reading,” she said, gesturing towards the book and files. “My career to date has not given me much occasion to face such evils perpetrated against a man’s mind.”

“Yeah, it’s not easy reading,” said Sam. He’d had his own fair share of sleepless nights thanks to reading the Winter Soldier files.

“Most of what we know is in the files we already gave you,” said Steve. His face was stoic and his voice professional, a carefully cultivated defense mechanism. Sam had seen Steve through the horror of first reading the files, and there’d been a lot of ugly crying involved. Now Steve kept all that locked away.

They went over it anyway as Dr. Njue outlined what her team knew so far and what approaches they were considering. Sam frowned down at the innocuous little book with the star on it as he listened to Dr. Njue. There’d been something….Sam had raided plenty of HYDRA bases, both with Steve and on his own, and he’d seen a lot of files along the way. Some he’d managed to recover or copy over. But a few times the files had been incomplete or damaged, or he’d had to ditch them in favor of not being blown up or shot or trapped. There was something he’d seen in one of those, but it eluded him like the memory of a dream within a dream.

“Sam? You think of something?” asked Steve.

“Yeah. Or, no, sort of. I feel like I saw something once—” he shook his head, frustrated. “I can’t quite remember it. It was probably nothing.”

Steve nodded, disappointed, and turned his attention back to Dr. Njue. Sam couldn’t quite convince himself it was nothing. After their meeting with Dr. Njue was over, he went back to his room and started making a list: all the HYDRA bases he’d hit, with Steve or on his own, all the files he could remember reading. He returned to it again and again over the weeks, as they all worked on what Lang immediately took to calling “secret Avenging” against Ross and the Accords. Nothing had shaken loose yet, but Sam had to try.

 

* * *

 

The weeks passed in a numbing if familiar routine of hurry up and wait. In between waiting for intel and furtive meetings with Natasha and Sharon, the so-called Secret Avengers did some sightseeing in Wakanda, which was deeply impressive and exciting to Sam’s inner ten year old. Wakanda was beautiful, utterly new to Sam’s eyes, and not unlike visiting the future. Sam knew Wakanda had its own problems, and that T’Challa worked his ass off to run his country. Any illusions he’d ever had about the King of Wakanda living some luxurious life of cosseted leisure were pretty swiftly dispelled by the fact that Sam had yet to see T’Challa do anything _other_ than work. Even so, Wakanda _seemed_ an awful lot like a utopia to Sam, and it didn’t help that they basically had a royally endorsed free ride here. Most of the palace denizens paid them little mind, which was honestly a relief, and everything they needed was provided quietly and without fanfare. Steve especially had started getting all pinched mouth and weird about that, and was more or less on the verge of offering to, like, wash dishes in the palace kitchen or something to earn his keep, when T’Challa suggested Steve and the rest of the Avengers train with the Dora Milaje. Sam wasn’t sure how useful they were being on that score, but the Dora Milaje at least seemed to find them to be diverting challenges.

Sam and Steve still visited Bucky. Sam had a lot fewer sleepless nights now, but he still felt weird about Bucky being in cryo. He could intellectually accept that it was what Bucky wanted, that it was both safest and kindest to Bucky given the potential minefield in his head. It just didn’t _feel_ right. His mind always returned to the sight of watching Bucky exhale, and then fail to inhale again, and it was—not good. It was not a thing Sam liked to think about. Sam felt a little better about it if he and Steve visited with Bucky, like he was just in a coma and not frozen in some weird pseudo-death, like this was something close to normal. He definitely wasn’t visiting Bucky to get a glimpse of his stupid handsome face, or his broad chest, or his soft-looking hair. Nope. That would be inappropriate.

 

* * *

 

Steve was called away to a last-minute meeting with Fury just before the next time Bucky was scheduled to be revived.

“I oughta tell him to fuck off,” grumbled Steve as he angrily packed a bag. “I don’t work for him anymore.”

“I mean, you could, but we do kinda need that evidence he’s got on Ross and Zemo,” said Sam.

“A secret helicarrier, and now he's lurking in some goddamn secret submarine base. Where the hell does he get this stuff?”

Yeah, it was pretty crazy. Sam really wondered about the kind of man who had a secret submarine as a contingency plan. “He’s probably got a secret volcano base on some uncharted Pacific island too.”

“He would,” said Steve darkly. He finished packing his duffle and Sam walked with him to the palace’s airfield. “Can you please be there when they wake Bucky up? I don’t want him to be alone, or to worry about why I’m not there.”

“Of course. I was planning on it,” said Sam, because he had been from the moment he’d realized Steve couldn’t be there.

“Thank you, Sam,” said Steve, and gave him a swift, hard hug before boarding the Wakandan jet. “Tell him I should be back tomorrow night.”

So Sam was there bright and early the next morning when Dr. Njue tapped some commands into the cryostasis tube, and he watched as the last of the cold gases were vented out with a hiss. There was half a minute or so of tense stillness and then Bucky took in the breath that he had last let out four weeks ago, and Sam relaxed.

“All is well,” Dr. Njue told him with a smile, and she and the nurses eased Bucky out of the cryostasis tube onto a bed piled with warming blankets that was situated right in a patch of bright morning sunlight. Bucky’s skin was warming up from its prior pallor as Sam watched, as if all it took to come back to life was sunlight, though he didn’t stir other than the welcome and steady rise and fall of his chest.

“He should wake in an hour or so,” said Dr. Njue, before turning her attention to the assorted readings from the cryo unit and on Bucky’s vital.

Sam pulled up a chair beside Bucky’s bed to wait. He wished, suddenly, that Steve had given him some direction on what Bucky might need as he woke. Sam had figured he’d just be a friendly face, a reassurance to Bucky that he was safe and that Steve would be there soon. But now he was second-guessing himself, wondering if Bucky needed more comfort than that, or more space. Sam thought back to when he’d done this for Steve, after the helicarriers had fallen, and pulled out his phone. If there was anything that would reassure Bucky that he wasn’t waking up to a round of mind wipes and torture and killing, it was the smooth tones of Marvin Gaye’s voice. He set _Trouble Man_ to start playing, and sat back to listen, and wait.

_What’s Going On_ was close to finishing when Bucky started to shift a little under the blankets, a slight frown creasing his forehead. Sam sat up from his bored slouch.

“Hey Bucky, you with us again?” asked Sam, keeping his voice low and soft.

Bucky’s eyes moved under his still-closed eyelids, and Sam saw his throat work as he swallowed hard. He turned his face into the sunlight and sighed, a long and sleepy sort of sigh that made Sam want to get under the blankets with him. Bucky’s long eyelashes fluttered as he blinked awake, squinting against the sunlight, and oh, oh goddammit, but the light hit his eyes just right and turned them into a sweet and deep sort of summer sky blue color that made Sam’s stomach swoop. The return of life and wakefulness to Bucky’s face was some serious Disney princess level nonsense too, what with the soft flush of warmth rising in his cheeks and his pink lips and the way his nose scrunched adorably, and those goddamn long dark eyelashes. Sam watched, rapt, as Bucky woke more fully and thoughts and emotions flickered across his face with heartbreaking clarity. Sam knew Bucky wouldn’t be able to talk for another couple hours yet, but just now his face did all his talking for him.

“It’s okay, you’re safe, we’re in Wakanda. Steve had to go meet Fury, but he’s fine, he’s gonna be back tonight.” Bucky squeezed his eyes shut and nodded, then curled up tight under the blankets and shivered. “Dr. Njue?” called Sam, a little concerned.

She came over with a smile, the warmth of it softening her usually austere face. “Good morning, Sergeant.” She checked his vital signs as Bucky squinted up at her. “You’re warming up well. Drink some water and tea, wait for your voice to return. I’ll have some questions for you then. I think we’ve achieved some real improvements this round of cryo.”

Bucky nodded and relaxed some.

“Should he be—?” Sam was still worried about the fine tremor he could see under the mass of blankets.

“Shivering is a good sign. He just needs to finish warming up to his baseline core temperature.”

Bucky’s eyes had gone a little distant, inward-focused, and Sam wondered what Dr. Njue had meant by improvements. Should he talk to, or more accurately at, Bucky? What had Steve done at this point? He should have asked. Bucky focused back on Sam, and flicked his eyes towards Sam’s phone with raised eyebrows, as the phone still played a Marvin Gaye song.

“Thought Marvin Gaye would be a good wake up alarm for you. You like it? No pressure, but we can’t be friends if you don’t.”

Bucky’s mouth quirked into a small, lopsided smile and his eyes crinkled a little. _We’re friends now?_ was what the expression on his face pretty clearly said.

“We’re getting there,” said Sam, smiling back. He rambled on about music at Bucky for a bit, until he'd warmed up enough to come out from under the blankets and drink some water, walk around a little. Sam had to really resist the urge to hug him. Steve would have hugged him. Did Bucky want a hug? He still looked kind of cold, and with the wide eyes and messy hair, he looked too damn adorable. Fuck it, Sam was gonna hug him.

“Hey, can I hug you?” he asked, because he wasn’t gonna be the kind of asshole who touched a traumatized POW without permission.

Bucky blinked at him, then shifted and bit his lip. He nodded. So Sam stepped forward and wrapped him up in a hug, a proper “it’s gonna be okay” kind of hug, none of that backslapping, face-saving bullshit. Bucky’s arm came around Sam’s shoulders and held on tight as he pressed in close, and he felt warm and reassuringly solid against Sam. Sam didn’t like to think how long Bucky had gone without a kind human touch. He was just acting as social support if he provided some kind human contact, right? Right. When they pulled apart, Bucky was smiling at him, sweet and soft, looking the furthest thing from the Winter Soldier imaginable.

“Awww, you’re just as cuddly as the Bucky Bear I used to have,” said Sam, and it was supposed to come out teasing but mostly he sounded fond, so he kind of wanted to die, or maybe just throw himself into the still-open cryostasis chamber behind them. Bucky just tilted his head and looked very confused, which was, fuck his life, also extremely cute. “Let’s get you some tea, huh? Get you talking again.” _So I can shut the fuck up before I say anything else stupid, oh my god_.

 

* * *

 

Sam stayed with Bucky until his voice returned and it was time for his tests and whatever else Dr. Njue needed from him.

“You good here? You want me to stay?”

Bucky shook his head, expression gone distant and thoughtful. “No, I’m fine.” He rubbed at his forehead, blinked in surprise and relief. “Great, actually. Thank you.”

So Sam left, and came back to have dinner with Steve and Bucky after Steve returned. Both Bucky and Steve looked like they were in good spirits when he joined them. Maybe it was just the prospect of having a week together until Bucky had to go back under, but there was a new ease in the way Bucky held himself.

“Good news?” Sam asked both of them.

“Fury’s evidence was worth it,” said Steve with a sharp grin. “And Dr. Njue had some good news for Buck, too.”

“Yeah?”

“Nothing about the trigger words yet, but my head feels a hell of a lot better. Their version of cryo—it helps. Stuff’s settling better, I guess.”

“That is good news,” said Sam.

They caught Bucky up on the past month as they ate dinner, and once the Secret Avengers portion of the while-you-were-frozen news digest was over with, Steve and Sam between them kept the conversation on lighter subjects, regaling Bucky with stories of their touristy sightseeing in Wakanda and their training sessions with the Dora Milaje. Sam was a little surprised by how fun the evening ended up being, how easy the time passed and the conversation flowed. The weirdness of their circumstances receded for once, and they were just three guys, shooting the shit. Steve was a lot louder and more given to laugh when egged on by Bucky’s sly or challenging comments, and Bucky—Bucky was a little bit of a revelation. He was still fairly quiet, but for the first time, Sam saw the guy memorialized in history books, charming and friendly with just enough of a rough edge to keep things interesting. This was a guy Sam wanted to be friends with, this was a guy he wanted to know. He hoped he’d have a chance to, beyond the brief periods Bucky spent awake and unfrozen.

 

* * *

 

Sam didn’t see Bucky for a couple of days, between Bucky working with Dr. Njue and Sam working with Steve on the information Steve had gotten from Fury. When he had a free moment, he swung by the medical suite to check on Bucky with the intention of asking if he wanted to grab some lunch. Bucky wasn’t there, but one of the nurses told him Bucky was in the palace gardens. Sam didn’t have high hopes of being able to find him there; the palace gardens weren’t an orderly walking path through some pretty greenery so much as they were a pocket of natural preserve that twined through parts of the sprawling palace grounds. Wakandans prized harmony with the natural world in their architecture, building around and with the natural features of the land wherever possible. The results were lovely, but difficult to navigate for those unused to them. Oh well, even if he didn’t find Bucky, at least he’d have a nice walk through some gorgeous scenery.

It took twenty minutes of wandering before he found Bucky in one of the sunlit little nooks of garden that had a bench and some particularly bright flowers, tucked away from the main paths. Sam stopped short when he realized Bucky wasn’t alone. There was the Dora Milaje guard who always shadowed him when he was out of the medical suite, of course, something Bucky himself had insisted on. That wasn’t what stopped Sam in his tracks. What stopped Sam in his tracks was the small menagerie surrounding Bucky. There was a cat on his lap, and another daintily picking its way around where Bucky sat on the bench, rubbing itself against him on the way. There were brightly colored tropical birds hopping around on the grass in front of Bucky, and singing from the tree branches. Among the deep greens of the plants surrounding them and the sunlight streaming through the leaves, golden and rich, Bucky’s white and gray clothes made him fairly glow.

_What the actual fuck kind of Disney nonsense is this_ , thought Sam with baffled rage. Was someone going to start singing soon? Was one of the animals going to start talking? Sam honest to god wouldn’t be surprised. This was his life now. As Sam watched, one of the birds, some ridiculous looking thing with eye-searing orange and green plumage and a comically round and fat body, did a particularly silly little hopping dance, and Bucky laughed. Now, Sam had seen the little loop of footage at the Smithsonian that had captured Bucky laughing, and yeah, that had been a pretty sight. In person, hearing the sweet and bright peal of sound, and seeing the way Bucky’s whole face creased up in delight, it was considerably more devastating. His nose, Sam noted with distant fury and terrible tenderness, scrunched up like a bunny’s when he laughed. Every single thing about this was unacceptable.

Sam stepped into Bucky’s field of view. “Hey Sam,” said Bucky with a smile, like everything that was happening here was normal.

“Making some new friends?” asked Sam, and congratulated himself on this totally calm and not at all embarrassing conversational opening.

“Yeah, I don’t know, I sat down to write a little—” Bucky tipped his head towards the notebook sitting on the bench beside him. “—and got some company.” Bucky smiled down at the cat curled up on his lap and scritched behind its ears. Sam could hear the deep rumble of its purring from where he was standing a few feet away. The cat fixed him with a suspicious slitted-eye stare and rose to situate itself more comfortably on Bucky’s lap, and holy shit, that was not a normal house cat or stray.

“Bucky, that is not a house cat. That is, I don’t know, a small leopard.”

Sure it looked like your average tabby stray, granted one with a weird little beard-like tuft of hair on its chin, but when it had stood up, it had easily been close to two feet tall at the shoulder. Bucky didn’t seem alarmed, and neither did the Nakia, Dora Milaje guard, who was instead just looking on the proceedings with a faintly indulgent expression. The other cat had gone to twine itself around her legs, and she briefly unbent to give it a pet. Wakandans, Sam had learned, held cats in great reverence and affection. They didn’t keep them as individual pets, and instead the cats were allowed to roam freely around the palace and capital city, spoiled and indulged by all.

“Awwww, she’s not dangerous,” said Bucky. He grinned at the cat and stroked her fur. “Are you, sweetheart? No, you’re not.” He scratched the cat under its funny beard. It closed its eyes in pleasure and butted at Bucky’s hand. Sam could have lived the rest of his life without having heard Bucky goddamn Barnes baby-talking a Wakandan wildcat like it was a harmless little kitten and not a mid-sized murderbeast capable of ripping his throat out.

“Aren’t they, like, sacred or something? Should you be petting it?” tried Sam.

Between the Great Panther and Bast, cats featured a lot in Wakandan religion. Sam hoped Bucky wasn’t mortally offending Wakanda by treating one of Bast’s sacred cats like a playful kitten, but probably he wasn’t judging by Nakia’s calm.

“The cats are Bast’s avatars in Wakanda, yes. But it is not taboo to touch or play with them, should they desire it. This little one seems to have taken a liking to Sergeant Barnes,” said Nakia.

“That cat is not little.”

“I suppose not,” allowed Nakia. “That is one of the wildcats that lives in the gardens. The Wakandan wildcats are a little larger than those in other regions of Africa. I think the groundskeepers call this one Hatshepsut, or sometimes little pharaoh. For that little beard she has. She is no danger to people, only to rodents.”

“The name suits her,” said Bucky, grinning at Nakia.

“Okay, fine, what about the birds?” Sam stepped close to inspect one, but it fluffed its feathers and flew up to a higher branch, where it ostentatiously preened itself as it thoroughly ignored Sam.

Bucky shrugged. “They were in the trees when I got here. I think they got curious and came down to look at me.”

“Right,” said Sam and crossed his arms. There was a big-tailed parrot-looking thing giving him the stink eye from one of the tree branches above him. He narrowed his eyes at it. It better not poop on him.

“You jealous the birds like me more than you, Wilson?”

“No! I don’t care about the birds.”

“Sure, Falcon.”

“I don’t! Anyway, I came looking for you for a reason. Haven’t seen you in a couple of days, wanted to know if you were up for grabbing some lunch.”

“Yeah, sounds good. If Hatshepsut will let me up.” Sam rolled his eyes. “Hey honey, wanna let me up? Know you can’t hear it over that thundering you call a purr, but my stomach’s growling too, I gotta eat,” Bucky crooned down at the cat, as if she could understand.

And maybe she could, because with one regal tilt of her head, she allowed that yes, she might let Bucky up to go eat, and jumped lightly off of Bucky’s lap to the ground.

“Thank you,” Bucky told her in all seriousness, and Sam had to try really hard not to smile.

Bucky grabbed his notebook and got up, wobbling a little as he stood. Sam moved to steady him, and Bucky let him. “Alright?”

“Shit, yeah. Sorry, my balance is still shot,” he said, rolling his shoulders with a briefly uncomfortable expression as they walked out of the garden.

“No worries. You planning on getting a new prosthetic?”

“T’Challa’s working on one for me, but it’s gonna be a whole involved process,” said Bucky with a grimace. “Dr. Njue said maybe next time I’m out of cryo.”

Sam noticed they had a shadow apart from Nakia as they walked back towards the palace proper. Hatshepsut was padding along sedately beside Bucky, as if she had places to be and just happened to be walking with them. Because of course. Of course Bucky was gaining an animal sidekick. That was all this insane situation needed. Honestly, it was a little unsettling, since Hatshepsut’s full height came up past Sam’s knee, which was just—too large. Too large for a wildcat that still looked mostly like a house cat, apart from its size.

“Looks like you’ve got a sidekick now,” said Sam, and his tone was some weird mix of suppressed hilarity and grim acceptance. Bucky looked askance at him for it, then directed a small, surprised smile at Hatshepsut.

“Nah, she’ll get bored.”

But she didn’t. Apart from when she presumably went off to hunt or when she was sleeping somewhere, Hatshepsut shadowed Bucky for the rest of the week, making herself at home wherever he was. She minced delicately among the equipment in the medical suite and demanded pets from Bucky, who always gave in. Sam understood nothing about what was happening.

Steve just rolled his eyes fondly. “Bucky and his strays,” he said, shaking his head.

“Says one of my strays,” retorted Bucky with a grin as he gave Steve a quick squeeze around the shoulders. Steve grumbled, but he was beaming.

The Wakandans were visibly charmed by Bucky’s new friend, and by Bucky’s manner with her. Sam had seen no fewer than five assorted members of Dr. Njue’s team, all highly educated medical professionals and scientists, reduced to cooing what he assumed was the Wakandan equivalent of “you’re a kitty!” to Hatshepsut while Hatshepsut stayed as aloof and regal as a statue of her namesake pharaoh. She liked to drape herself all over Bucky though, and monopolized his attention often. Bucky was a soft touch for her and always let her, even when he was clearly feeling shitty after tests and sessions with Dr. Njue, and you’d think Hatshepsut could hold up her own end of the conversation the way Bucky talked to her. It was therapeutic, probably, but she was a wild animal and Sam remained wary. Those teeth and claws of hers seemed sharp. 

When T’Challa came by to discuss Bucky’s new prosthetic, he smiled to see Hatshepsut holding court in the medical suite. She perked up with interest when she spotted T’Challa, and trotted happily over to him. T’Challa scooped her up into his arms easily, like she wasn’t the size of a somewhat large dog.

“Hello, little pharaoh, making new friends?” She purred as if to say yes. Sam was honestly starting to wonder about that cat. If she ever talked, he wouldn’t even be surprised at this point.

“So, you _do_ like cats,” said Sam, which earned him an exasperated look from T’Challa and, somehow, from Hatshepsut too. Jesus, what was up with that damned cat?

 

* * *

 

It seemed like every time Sam saw Bucky during his week out of stasis, he had one of his notebooks close to hand, either still writing in it, or just having set it aside. The reminder that Sam had looked in some of Bucky’s notebooks made a vague, frantic sort of guilt flare up in him, only matched by his curiosity about what Bucky was writing now. Memories? Impressions of Wakanda? More things to look up?

After about the fourth time he seemingly interrupted Bucky, having tracked him down with the intention of hanging out with him while everyone else was otherwise occupied, he flopped down on the couch Bucky was curled up on and said, “Sorry, I don’t mean to keep interrupting you writing in your diary. Just tell me if you want some alone time.”

Bucky looked up with a sharp glint in his eyes. “Don’t think I haven’t noticed this scheme you and Steve have going to make sure I’m not alone. I managed a couple years on my own, I can pass a few spare hours too. I don’t need babysitting.”

“It’s not babysitting,” said Sam, and discreetly tried to lean over to get a look at Bucky’s notebook. Bucky leaned away with a narrow-eyed glare.

“There is a whole other end of the couch, Wilson, use it. If it’s not babysitting, what is it?”

Sam did not move over to the free end of the couch. He scooted closer. Bucky sighed and made room.

“Uh, friendship? Steve misses you, man, he wants to spend time with you. Time when you’re not in a freezer. Not that it isn’t extremely restful hanging out with a totally silent you. You’re a real good listener, Barnes.”

“Oh? What are you telling frozen me?”

Shit, abort, abort, Bucky did not need to know about Steve and Sam’s all-too frequent visits to frozen-Bucky.

“Mostly I complain about Steve. He is a really high maintenance best friend.”

Bucky laughed. “Yeah, he is.”

“That why you stayed away?” asked Sam. _Ha, deflection achieved._

“No,” said Bucky, and didn’t elaborate. Sam let the silence ride.

They were pressed up pretty close on the couch, way closer than could be justified by Sam fucking with Bucky. If Bucky had tensed up, Sam would’ve moved. But he didn’t, he relaxed even, and seemed content to scribble away in the notebook resting on the couch’s arm, with Sam sitting quietly beside him. Sam was content to sit together in silence for now too, soak in some of Bucky’s calm.

After a few minutes, Bucky asked, without looking up, “Is the sight of me writing just that interesting?” Some of his hair fell into his face and he blew it away irritably.

“A little bit. I’m wondering what it is you’ve been scribbling all week. ‘Dear Diary, I made a new friend this week, she’s a dangerous wildcat who might tear my throat out, but I think she’s the cutest kitty….’”

Bucky snorted and said, “‘Dear Diary, my best friend’s other best friend is kind of a pain in the ass and none of the birds of Wakanda like me, which is hurting my feelings…’” Sam grinned and elbowed him gently. Bucky’s hair flopped over his face again, and he tossed his head in annoyance, finally setting his pen down so he could comb it back. It looked really soft.

“You need a haircut. Or a hair tie, one or the other,” said Sam.

“Hard to pull it back with one hand,” muttered Bucky.

“We could get you some sparkly barrettes, if you want. You could get those in with one hand. You’d look real pretty.”

Now Bucky’s lips curled into a challenging sort of smirk, and he glanced up at Sam from under his eyelashes. Sam’s stomach gave a nervous and thrilled little flutter, like he was flying up to the apex of a steep dive.

“You already think I’m pretty,” Bucky said, voice gone low and intimate, and Sam really fucking wished he could truthfully deny that. But here Bucky was, with that sinful mouth and those long, pretty eyelashes, and goddammit, was Bucky _blushing_? Sam couldn’t even work up any proper indignation at Bucky’s presumption, not when Sam had blurted out some ludicrous compliment about Bucky’s eyes when he’d first been revived.

So Sam gave into the urge to touch Bucky’s hair and brushed a few errant strands off of his forehead. It was as soft as it looked. “Yeah, maybe.”

Bucky’s smirk softened into a shy smile as he returned his attention to his notebook, and he leaned into Sam’s side. Were they cuddling now? This felt like cuddling. Sam brought his arm around Bucky’s shoulders, and Bucky burrowed in closer with a contented little huff. Sam had a decent view of Bucky’s notebook now, which Bucky didn’t seem too bothered about.

“My memories are clearer, lately. That’s what I’ve been scribbling about,” said Bucky quietly.

“I don’t mean to pry. You don’t have to show me or anything, if you don’t want to.”

Bucky raised an amused eyebrow. “You already looked at my notebooks, you’re gonna try to come over all virtuous now?”

Sam went tense with surprise and dismay, and winced. Bucky didn’t seem angry about it, at least. “How’d you know?”

Now Bucky grinned. “If I didn’t before, I do now.” _Fuck_ , thought Sam. This was why he wasn’t a spy. “Steve told me you’re the one who brought my notebooks back to Wakanda. Thank you for that, by the way. Anyway, you get this guilty look on your face every time you see me writing.”

“I do not,” Sam denied automatically. He probably did. “Um, sorry. I didn’t, y’know, read all of them, mostly I just looked at your catching up on the 21st century notebook. You know Steve keeps one like that too?”

“Speak of the devil,” said Bucky, and Steve walked in, Hatshepsut ambling along behind him.

Steve blinked at them in surprise for a brief moment, and Sam had the urge to leave some room for Jesus between him and Bucky. He kind of felt like his dad had just walked in on him getting a little too fresh with a date he was passing off as a study partner. Springing apart now would just look more suspicious though, so he didn’t move, and neither did Bucky.

“Hey guys. I’m not interrupting anything, am I?”

“No, we’re just hanging out,” said Sam. Yeah, just two dudes, hanging out. Cuddling on the couch.

Steve nodded amiably at this answer, but Hatshepsut, the little hellcat, narrowed her golden-green eyes at Sam and made every effort to squeeze in between him and Bucky on the couch. Her sharp claws pricked at Sam and her tail smacked him in the face, making Sam swear and move over on the couch. Bucky laughed and set his notebook down to shift her over onto his own lap.

“Awww, hey sweetheart, had a good hunt?” Hatshepsut nuzzled at his hand and let out her rumbling purr. From this close, that purr was practically as loud as a Harley roaring down the street.

“I’m surprised she didn’t bring you a dead rat,” said Steve, amused. “Seriously Buck, what did you do to get her to like you so much?”

“Nothing! She just showed up, honest. She’ll probably forget all about me once I’m in cryo, she’s got a palace full of humans who’ll spoil her.”

 

* * *

 

Hatshepsut didn’t forget about Bucky though. Once Bucky went back into cryo, Sam thought Hatshepsut might go back to her usual wildcat life of catching assorted rodents in the palace gardens and scamming other Wakandans out of affection, but she didn’t, not entirely. She took up residence beside Bucky’s cryochamber instead, like the watchful guard of Bucky’s stasis, or like she was waiting. One night, Sam spotted her putting a paw on the glass of the chamber. She even let out a forlorn little mrowing sound. It was the saddest goddamn thing, some Fry’s dog level shit, and Sam felt himself tearing up despite himself.

One of the Wakandan scientists saw and got all choked up about it too, immediately getting up from his workstation to murmur comfortingly to Hatshepsut in Wakandan and cuddle her a little. Sam was kind of offended. Hatshepsut had yet to give Sam anything other than a cool and vaguely contemptuous look, and a smack of her tail.

“Are you kidding me?” he hissed at the cat once the scientist returned to his workstation. “This is not a Disney movie. There is no montage. No one’s gonna sing a sad song. Pull yourself together, cat,” he whispered furiously to her. The Wakandan scientist looked up from his work to give Sam some serious side eye. Sam smiled politely. “She really misses Bucky, huh?”

“Indeed. It’s a blessing and an honor to be befriended by such a cat as Hatshepsut. She’s a good omen for his recovery, I think.”

“Yeah. Yeah, here’s to hoping.”

 

* * *

 

Sam was still making steady but laborious progress on his list of HYDRA bases and files. He felt, perversely, more urgency in the task when Bucky was in cryo than when he was out. It was stupid, Bucky was fine in cryo, safe and not even aware of the time passing. There wasn’t even a ticking countdown clock on deprogramming the trigger words, and Dr. Njue was being deliberately cautious and conservative about Bucky’s treatment.

“I know the pace of this research is frustrating. But his mind has been harmed enough. It behooves us to be careful and avoid further harm, and achieve as much healing as possible before we tackle the trigger words,” she’d said once Bucky was back in stasis.

But slow and steady pace or not, Sam still felt like he needed to track down this wisp of a lead sooner rather than later. Dr. Njue and her team were missing a key piece of the process HYDRA had used to program the triggers, something that wasn’t in the book with the trigger words or in the files they had, something that Bucky couldn’t remember amid the tangle of torture and trauma. None of them felt comfortable trying any deprogramming methods until they had that missing piece. A form of exposure therapy was their best option right now, but given what they’d be exposing Bucky to, it was too close to actual torture for anyone’s comfort. No one was willing to inflict that on Bucky unless they could be something close to sure it would work.

Setbacks and obstacles aside, at least Steve seemed to have regained some new infusion of resolve and patience after spending a whole week with Bucky. It had helped that Bucky had been less closed off, that his memories had apparently regained some clarity and solidity. Steve and Sam’s visits with Bucky in stasis were distinctly less gloomy and sad now.

“Hey, thanks for being there when Bucky woke up the other week,” said Steve one night while he stroked Hatshepsut. Hatshepsut had wandered in a few minutes ago, and after making a thorough inspection of Bucky’s cryochamber, she’d consented to let Steve pet her. She had yet to let Sam lay a finger on her. Sam wasn’t annoyed about that, no, not at all.

“No problem. Figured he could use a friendly face, keep him from freaking out.”

“And, uh, you’re friends now? You spent a lot of time with him last week.”

“Getting there,” said Sam, suspicious now. Steve looked too earnest.

“I’m glad. He’s—I know you don’t know him that well yet, and I know he’s not the same Bucky he was, but—he’s still pretty much the best guy I know. Apart from you.”

The compliment made Sam feel like a warm glow had taken residence inside of him, and he could feel it rising to his face. He was glad the blush wouldn’t show on his skin.

“Thanks, Steve. That means a lot,” he said, because it did.

Sam was cognizant that Steve wouldn’t trust Bucky with just anybody, that he had, in fact, not trusted anyone but Natasha and Sam with him in any meaningful way, and now T’Challa too. Steve Rogers trusting you with his life was one thing; anyone on his team who’d proven themselves in combat or a sticky situation earned that. Steve Rogers trusting you with Bucky Barnes, with his memories of him and with the man’s actual safety—that was something else entirely, something deeper and more precious. Sam understood it a little better now, having seen them together. Bucky had a piece of Steve no one else had or ever would, and vice versa. If Steve sometimes didn’t seem to hold his own life as something precious, worthy of care, he made up for it in the lengths he’d go to for the lives of those he cared about, Bucky most of all.

“He’s pretty comfortable with you,” ventured Steve, and shit, was this about the whole cuddling situation Steve had walked in on? Was Steve jealous or weirded out? Steve and Bucky were plenty physically affectionate with each other, more so than Sam had ever seen Steve be with anybody else, actually, but he didn’t think they were together. Hell, he’d have assumed they were both straight, but no straight man reacted the way Bucky had to being called pretty. Sam tried not to think about it too hard. It wasn’t exactly the time to start anything. True love’s kiss wasn’t going to break this particular curse.

“I guess. That a problem?” he asked carefully.

Steve looked up from Hatshepsut, shocked. “No! No, of course not! It’s only—he’s still pretty tense around just about everyone else but Dr. Njue, T’Challa, and us two. And Hatshepsut. I worry, I guess. He used to be the kind of guy who’d befriend anyone and everyone.”

“He’s been through a lot of shit. He’s doing, frankly, miraculously well, considering. Expecting him to be sociable on top of everything else is too much.”

“I know that, and god, I’m grateful for how well he’s doing. I just—I want him to be happy. I want you to be happy too.” Steve radiated earnest concern at near lethal levels. Sam kind of wanted to put his hand over Steve’s face to block the force of it.

But he didn’t, and he didn’t ask, _And what about you?_ Sam wasn’t sure Steve had an answer, anymore than he’d had one back when Sam had first asked him what made him happy.

“I’m living rent-free in a palace in paradise. I think I’m pretty set, Steve.”

Sure, he was also a fugitive, vigilante superhero with unclear future prospects and some lingering PTSD and guilt issues, plus a distressing tendency to compare his best friend’s best friend to a Disney princess. All of that, he had to hope, was just temporary. _Get the princess and you’ll have your happily ever after_ , said the Disney-damaged portion of his brain. Sam ignored it.

 

* * *

 

The next time Bucky came out of cryo, it was time for a new arm. While Steve, Sam, and the others had been going down the investigative rabbit hole that was figuring out just how the Raft had been built and where the money for it had come from (surprise surprise, supermax superhero prison hadn’t been a line item in the Accords, and it turned out the UN was kind of testy about Ross preemptively building it), T’Challa, Dr. Njue, and her team had been working on Bucky’s new prosthetic. The “whole involved process” Bucky had alluded to earlier apparently involved surgery. The existing port for his arm and the connections to his spinal cord were less than ideal, and needed to be modified or replaced before they could attach the new prosthetic T’Challa had designed.

Sam wasn’t privy to all the details; he just knew Bucky and Steve had been holed up with the medical team for nearly two days straight going over the plan and getting Bucky’s input on the new prosthetic. When they emerged, Bucky looked pale but resolute, and Steve had the brow wrinkle of worry.

“Surgery tomorrow,” said Steve. “He’s gonna be under general anesthetic for the spinal surgery part, then just local for the rest.” Seemed straightforward enough.

“Alright, Bucky? New arm pass muster?” asked Sam.

Bucky nodded tightly, but didn’t say anything, and stayed quiet and distant through the rest of the day, only sparing a small smile or two for Hatshepsut, for whom Bucky’s return to the land of the living was occasion to act like an over-excited kitten. Sam didn’t know what specifically was eating at Bucky about this, but he tried not to worry. Getting surgery wasn’t exactly something anyone looked forward to, much less someone with a not insignificant amount of medical trauma. Sam figured Bucky’d at least had ample opportunity to say no to this particular medical procedure. He didn’t need Sam motherhenning him, no matter how much that instinct was rearing up in Sam.

When they stopped by the medical suite to see Bucky the next morning before his surgery, Bucky was halfway checked out, not all there. The blankness of his face was eerie, too reminiscent of the Winter Soldier, and his eyes were glassy.

“You okay, Buck? You don’t have to do this if you don’t want to. It’s okay if you’ve changed your mind,” said Steve, and moved to touch Bucky, but he flinched back and Steve stopped, stricken. Bucky closed his eyes, took a few shaky, deep breaths, before opening his eyes again to give Steve a wan and apologetic little quirk of the lips.

“Not okay. Obviously. Still wanna do this.”

Sam wanted to hustle Bucky away from the medical suite and into the gardens, get him to stop looking like he’d retreated somewhere inside himself that neither Sam nor Steve could follow. He’d even bring Hatshepsut to Bucky himself if it’d make Bucky look less like he was getting ready to lock some part of himself away. Though shit, maybe dissociation wasn’t so terrible a coping mechanism, given the givens.

Instead Sam said, “Hope you asked T’Challa to add some sweet new features to your arm to make this worth your while. I’m thinking laser pointer finger, a storage compartment, maybe, like, some blender attachments….”

Bucky laughed, and it was a weak and half-hysterical little laugh, but it was a laugh. “Blender attachments?” he asked, looking more present now.

“Yeah, give you some new career options. Add a whisk, some beaters too.” He made his voice go all movie trailer announcer low. “The Winter Baker.”

“I am a good baker, it’s true,” said Bucky, all solemn. Steve got a wistful look all of a sudden.

“You did do a pretty good job with your ma’s coffee cake recipe.”

“Alright, it’s settled. You’re making us a cake.”

“Giving me a lot to look forward to, here.”

“Uh huh. Cake, our company, a new arm….” said Sam, and tried not to melt into a sappy mess when Bucky gave him a small smile that actually reached his eyes.

“Are you ready, Sergeant Barnes?” asked Dr. Njue. Bucky took a bracing sort of deep breath and nodded.

“Yeah, I’m ready.”

“We’ll be here when you’re out of surgery, Buck. It’ll be fine. You’re safe,” said Steve.

“Don’t let him watch, Sam!” called out Bucky as he was being wheeled away to the operating room. “He’ll just end up barfing!”

“Would not!” said Steve, indignant and affronted.

“C’mon, Steve,” said Sam. “Watching won’t help anything, we can wait out here.”

 

* * *

 

Around hour three of waiting, Sam regretted not having gotten the details of Bucky’s surgery. He didn’t know how long was normal, or how invasive a surgery it was, or when it was time to start getting worried about how long it was taking. It couldn’t be too bad if they planned to attach the new arm right away, he reasoned, but it seemed like surgery involving the spinal cord should require a little more caution. But what did Sam know, he was just a medic.

Close to hour five, one of the nurses came out to give them an update. She didn’t have a bad news sort of expression on her face, at least.

“It’s going well. We’re nearly finished with the work on his spinal cord and the existing port and attachment points. He’s burning through the anesthesia faster than expected though, so we have less time than we’d hoped for. We’ll call you in as he’s coming out of general anesthesia, Captain Rogers, so you can help keep him calm for the remainder of the procedure.”

“Right, okay. Thank you,” said Steve, relaxing a minuscule amount.

Steve was called into the OR less than an hour later, which left Sam kicking his heels in the medical suite. Bucky kept a small stash of books here, so Sam raided those and passed the time reading. They were all scifi, because Bucky truly was a giant nerd. Sam would’ve thought Bucky’s life was science fiction enough for him, but apparently not. He settled in to read the most interesting looking of the paperbacks, some space opera looking thing with spaceships on the cover.

Sam was about a third of the way through the book when Steve came back out. He looked a little stressed, but he was smiling and the set of his shoulders was loose, so things had gone fine, probably.

“How’s he doing?”

“Everything went fine, the new arm works. He freaked out a little when he first came out of the anesthesia, but he settled down when I talked to him some. No complications other than him burning through the drugs too fast.”

Sam sighed in relief. “Good, that’s good. He up for a quick visit?”

“He might have fallen asleep by now, but sure,” said Steve, so Sam followed him into the recovery room.

Bucky was lying on his stomach, bare to the waist with his upper back and shoulder swathed in bandages. The seam where metal met skin was covered with bandages too; they’d put some skin grafts in to ease some of the scarring and the pain associated with it, according to Steve, with skin grown from Bucky’s own cells, which was some real futuristic shit. The new prosthetic was some real futuristic shit too from what Sam could see of it. Bucky had his new arm stretched out a little over his head, bent at the elbow. It looked much like the old prosthetic, only sleeker and more matte, a darker nearly gunmetal grey color instead of the shiny silver of the old one. The series of interlocking plates had a more organic look too, flowing in the smooth and harmonious lines that characterized the Wakandan design aesthetic. T’Challa had done a beautiful job.

Sam could only see Bucky’s profile, and he was asleep, or at least had his eyes closed. His brow was furrowed and he was pale, but he didn’t look bad otherwise, especially for someone who’d just come out of surgery. His hair was a mess though. Sam’s fingers itched to comb it into order.

“Buck?” called Steve softly, but Bucky didn’t stir.

“Don’t wake him, I’ll swing by when he’s feeling up to visitors,” said Sam, and Steve smiled gratefully at him as he moved to sit in the chair by the bed. “You need anything?”

“No, I’m good. Thanks, Sam. Really.”

 

* * *

 

When he went back to the main medical suite to grab the book he’d been reading (Sam was invested now, he needed to finish it), he was greeted with the sight of T’Challa, still in medical scrubs, holding a distinctly aggrieved looking Hatshepsut in his arms.

“No, little pharaoh, you cannot go see Bucky just yet. No cats in sterile recovery rooms,” he chided her. Hatshepsut yowled. “I know, I know, but he’s fine, I promise.”

“Can you actually talk to cats?” blurted out Sam.

T’Challa looked up, raised a regal eyebrow. The effect was somewhat diminished by Hatshepsut lashing her tail back and forth in his grip. “I was unaware talking to cats required any special skill.”

“No, I mean—never mind. I’m just gonna—” he grabbed the book and made his retreat.

 

* * *

 

Bucky wasn’t properly awake and up for visitors until late the next day, at which point he abruptly declared himself fine and asked if he could please leave the medical suite. Sam doubted the wisdom of this, but Bucky did look more or less okay. His left arm was in a sling to keep it stable while everything was still healing up, and he was pale but mobile. So Dr. Njue okayed it with strict instructions to come right back if he spiked a fever or his arm acted up.

“You know, most people would be laid up in a hospital bed for at least a few days after a surgery like that,” said Sam as he and Steve walked Bucky back to Steve’s suite. They were going at a sedate pace as Bucky walked with careful slowness to avoid jostling his arm, and to get his balance again. The new arm was significantly lighter apparently, so Bucky kept listing to the right as he overcompensated for a weight on the left that wasn’t there.

“I’m a medical marvel,” said Bucky in a flat tone.

“Sure thing, old man,” said Steve, and gently redirected Bucky’s rightward tilt.

“Oh, look who’s calling who old, asshole,” retorted Bucky, and Steve and Sam between them kept Bucky distracted with stupid bickering all the way there.

By the time they got Bucky settled in his bed in Steve’s suite, he’d gotten even paler and was breathing in pained, quick bursts. A light sweat had broken out on his face, and his eyes were glassy. He looked, in short, like someone who should not have goddamn left his hospital bed.

“Jesus, we oughta take you right the fuck back to medical,” said Sam. “You got any painkillers?”

“Nothing really works. Or, nothing short of knocking me the fuck out, and I don’t—I don’t like the stuff that fucks with my head,” answered Bucky. Sam exchanged a worried look with Steve.

“Dr. Njue asked him about his pain level before we left, he said it was a four. This doesn’t look like a four,” said Steve as he fussed with tucking the blankets in around Bucky, and shoving pillows behind his back. Bucky gave him a dirty look, but he did relax some as he gingerly eased himself against the pillows in a sitting up position.

“Yeah, wanna recalculate that for us, buddy? No macho shit.”

Bucky just blinked at them in hazy confusion. “I don’t—she asked, one to ten, how bad is it, but uh, maybe I don’t—” Bucky broke off with a gasp, squeezed his eyes shut. He rode out whatever wave of pain just hit him, then opened his eyes again. “—get it,” he ended weakly.

Sam wanted to snap back _what is there to get_ but thought better of it, given how out of it Bucky looked. “It’s the standard pain scale, man. One is, like, mildly annoying pain that you can basically ignore, four to six is moderate pain that’s preventing you from doing some stuff, and everything above that is severe pain. Ten is, you know, screaming agony.”

Bucky’s brow creased in pensive confusion. “Oh. Well then, I’m sticking with four.”

“This is not a four,” argued Sam, crossing his arms.

“I’ve been in screaming agony. A lot. This is a four,” said Bucky, expression now carefully blank.

Steve’s face crumpled a little and Sam winced. He probably should have considered that. His stomach flopped over with a sick little lurch as he remembered some of the horrors in the Winter Soldier file. Bucky’s pain scale was probably not like other people’s pain scale.

“You don’t have to tough this out, Buck. For god’s sake, this isn’t like when HYDRA had you,” said Steve, perching next to Bucky on the bed and running a hand over his hair. “What hurts?”

“Left side, from the neck over, and my back,” murmured Bucky, leaning into Steve’s touch.

“The arm too? I thought it was just wired for sensation.”

“T’Challa said it would take a while to settle. Nerves getting used to it and all. I’ll ride it out, it’s fine. You two can both go, you don’t need to nursemaid me.”

Steve got the Captain America look of resolve on his face, complete with jutted chin of stubbornness. “I’m gonna go talk to Dr. Njue, see if there’s anything she can give you.” At Bucky’s mutinous expression, he added, “Nothing that’ll make you fuzzy, just something to take the edge off. C’mon, Buck, if it was me, you’d be doing the same thing.”

“Fine,” allowed Bucky, which earned him a relieved smile from Steve.

Sam was saved from awkwardly standing around watching Bucky endure a moderate amount of pain when Hatshepsut darted into the room. She’d probably been lurking around outside waiting for the door to open. In pain or not, Bucky managed a sweet smile for her.

“Hey sweetheart,” said Bucky, and Sam felt an irrational surge of jealousy. Of a cat. Goddamn it.

Hatshepsut hopped onto the bed and proceeded to make a gentle examination of Bucky, sniffing at him and peering at his new vibranium alloy arm.

“Yeah, that’s a new addition,” Bucky said to her, and wiggled his fingers in the sling. Sam was ready to pull her off of him if she hurt him or exacerbated his pain, but Hatshepsut seemed to understand that Bucky was hurting and after a few more sniffs and some delicate nosing around, she curled up on Bucky’s good side with a leisurely, low swinging of her tail. Bucky pet her and she started up her rolling thunder purr.

“You know, sometimes they find people dead in their houses, and their pet cats ate their faces off,” said Sam.

“Hatshepsut wouldn’t eat my face off. Would you, girl? No, you wouldn’t.” Hatshepsut purred louder as if to agree, and nuzzled Bucky’s hand.

“She is a wild animal. You get that, right?”

“Of course,” scoffed Bucky. “But she likes me.”

This was demonstrably, if inexplicably, true. “She was real tragic about you being in cryo. Came to visit you and everything. All the scientists got real sappy about it.”

Bucky looked approximately fifty percent more sappy about it than any of the scientists, mouth going all soft and delighted, his eyes getting dewy. “Oh, honey, you don’t have to do that,” he crooned down at her. “But thank you.”

Oh, hell no. The cat did not just get a thank you before him. Sam had spent _hours_ visiting with frozen-Bucky!

“Excuse you, I visit you a ton when you’re in cryo too!”

Now Bucky looked up with raised eyebrows and a slow smile. “Yeah?”

_Shit, backtrack, be cool, be cool, Wilson._ He shrugged and said, “Uh, you know, some. Just checking in.”

“Uh huh. Well thank you to you too then,” said Bucky, and Sam could have dealt with it if he’d been teasing or sarcastic, but Bucky said it low and pleased, still smiling wide enough to make his eyes do that stupid adorable scrunching up thing.

It weakened Sam’s defenses enough to have him sitting on the edge of the bed, pressing a hand to Bucky’s forehead. His skin was hot, but not much warmer than the usual overclocked supersoldier metabolism.

“You feeling a little better now?”

Bucky gave a noncommittal hum and tipped his head back, closing his eyes. The pain showed stark on his face for a moment, carving deep lines, and Sam wondered how bad it really did hurt, if Bucky’s body, having endured unfathomable levels of pain, counted anything less than screaming agony as a relief. He wondered if there was other pain Bucky had swallowed down, accepting it as inevitable or unavoidable. _My head feels a hell of a lot better_ , he’d said, after that second round of cryo. Sam had thought he’d meant it figuratively, but maybe not. Sam kept his hand on Bucky’s forehead, stroked his hair a little.

Dr. Njue bustled in with Steve on her heels before Sam could formulate a question about it. “Bucky, you said you were fine,” she chided.

“I am,” protested Bucky. “You said some pain is normal.”

Dr. Njue tsked disapprovingly and set about taking Bucky’s vitals and checking his readings on her tricorder. Sam knew the Wakandans had their own name for it, but it was basically a tricorder in form and function, so that’s what Sam called it.

“Well, nothing is wrong,” she allowed. “If this level of pain continues for longer than a few days, then we’ll re-evaluate. Just let it all heal up for now, let the nerves finish integrating and adjusting.”

“Any pain relief options for him?” asked Steve.

“Nothing that isn’t too much hammer for this particular nail, unfortunately. And I know Bucky doesn’t wish to be impaired in any way. I did bring some heavy-duty muscle relaxants though, all that tension you’re carrying isn’t helping.”

“I told you, it’s fine, Steve. I’ll ride it out.” He gingerly rolled his neck, and winced and went even more pale than he already was at the results. “I’ll take that muscle relaxant though.”

“Excellent. No side effects here other than some drowsiness. Rest up, we’ll do some physical therapy in a couple of days.”

 

* * *

 

Steve and Sam kept Bucky company off and on as he finished recovering from surgery, which was mostly a matter of quietly reading something as Bucky dozed, or watching something with him if he was awake. To Sam’s horror, Steve’s picks for movies to watch were all Disney animated movies. Apparently, he and Bucky had seen Snow White back in the day, and Steve wanted to share the marvels of modern animation with Bucky, proving entirely immune to any uncomfortable parallels to their current situation. Which just made Sam feel like a crazy person. But Sam wasn’t reaching with this, okay? Bucky was under a _curse_ (trigger words) and he was (intermittently) in a _sleep like death_ (cryostasis) until the curse could be _lifted by magic_ (Wakandan science), and also Bucky had a precocious animal companion (Hatshepsut) and he had that whole big blue eyes and handsome thing going, and while love at first sight was bullshit, Sam was definitely having some emotions, some soft-hearted and wanting sort of emotions—it was Sam’s own personal hell. He wished sleep-deprived and traumatized Sam hadn’t thought of any of this fairy tale bullshit. He wished Bucky weren’t so damned likable.

They got through Beauty and the Beast (Belle was a giant nerd, like Bucky, Sam’s brain unhelpfully pointed out) and Mulan (who was a badass fighter, like Bucky, _shut the fuck up, brain_ ) before Sam quietly snapped and suggested, “Hey, I think Bucky would like Wall-E!” Bucky did like Wall-E, a lot, so score one for Sam. He was going to blow Bucky’s mind with a space movie marathon sometime soon.

 

* * *

 

Once Bucky was fully up and about, Sam didn’t see him for a couple days, as Bucky apparently breezed through rehab and physical therapy and Sam spent some quality time with a batch of HYDRA files Natasha had gotten for him. He felt close to shaking loose whatever it was he was chasing, close enough that he was considering straight up asking Bucky if there was anything he could remember that would help. It was something from the 1960s, or 1970s, he was sure, something that hadn’t been digital….but then, that described a lot of what he’d found in old, abandoned HYDRA bases, and even in active ones.

Sam did end up getting an assist from Bucky, if not quite in the way he’d hoped or imagined. When he surfaced from his deep dive into the files, he figured he could do with a walk and some socialization, so he set out to track Steve or Bucky down. Bucky only had a couple more days before he was going back under, so he was probably with Steve if he wasn’t in medical. Sam did indeed find Bucky in Steve’s suite, though Steve wasn’t there. Bucky was curled up tight on the couch, scribbling frantically in one of his notebooks.

“Hey Bucky,” said Sam, a little worried. Bucky’s hair was a mess, face unshaven, and there were dark circles under his eyes. Bucky didn’t answer, which was more worrying still. Sam went a little closer, but kept a careful distance. “Bucky? You okay?”

Now Bucky flinched, hard, and his eyes darted up to Sam for a second before he shook his head and returned his attention to his notebook.

“Can I come closer?” Bucky nodded. So Sam joined him on the couch to wait whatever this was out. He didn’t feel right leaving Bucky alone just now. Eventually Bucky stopped writing and pressed the heel of his hand into his forehead, a strangled and pained noise escaping him. He was shaking a little. Now Sam was really worried.

“I can’t—there’s something—something’s wrong.” Every word came out like it hurt, to Sam’s alarm.

“Is it your head? Your arm? You need me to get Dr. Njue?” Bucky shook his head in an emphatic no. “Bucky, if something’s wrong, if you’re hurting—”

“No. Not—I’m not _hurt_. The triggers—I think I can’t _talk_ about them, about how they—I thought I just didn’t remember, but now I do—or I think—something’s wrong,” he finished again, wide-eyed, and breathing fast and panicked.

“Okay, okay, we’ll figure it out. You can’t talk about it, that’s fine. Can you write?”

“I’m trying and none of it makes sense.” Frustration, and not a little fear, were thick in Bucky’s voice.

Sam looked over Bucky’s shoulder at the notebook. Certainly none of it made sense to him, it was a scrawl of Russian and German and maybe some English, none of it particularly legible, which was disturbing on its own given Bucky’s usual impeccable penmanship.

“Let’s just sit a while then, huh? Take a few deep breaths, slow down. Don’t push it so hard.” Bucky sighed and nodded shakily. Surgery aside, Bucky had generally seemed to be on such an even keel before this that seeing him so visibly distressed now was far more difficult than Sam had expected. Maybe Steve had seen some of this before, but Sam hadn’t. It was making him feel a little frantic, and a lot heartbroken. “Hey, can I touch you?”

Bucky gave him a sharp look. “You don’t usually ask.”

“You seem pretty on edge right now, didn’t want to make any assumptions.” Bucky just plastered himself against Sam’s side in answer, so Sam wrapped an arm around him until Bucky’s shaking subsided some.

“Sorry,” murmured Bucky after a few minutes. “This is—I’m being crazy right now, I know, you don’t have to—”

“Shut up and enjoy this cuddling,” said Sam. And then, after some hesitation, “Listen, we’re none of us beacons of stability and mental health, okay? There was a time not that long ago when I wasn’t doing so hot. Like, stayed up for about 72 hours straight and decided to re-grout the bathroom tile not doing so hot.” It hadn’t really been a sanity high point for him, though he was aware other guys had it worse after coming home.

“You got better,” said Bucky, only half a question.

“Yeah, I got better. Now I spend my sleepless nights staring at your frozen face, so. Make of that what you will.” Bucky huffed out a little laugh against Sam’s shoulder.

“Sorry I’m not awake to keep you company those nights,” he said.

“Because that’s something to look forward to,” said Sam, trying for sarcastic and missing.

Bucky breathed deep and even for a bit, leaning warm and heavy against Sam, then he reached for the pen and notebook again. He started shaking again then, and Sam chafed his arms a little, as if cold was the problem. Bucky wrote something, keeping his face pressed in against Sam’s chest so he wasn’t looking at the paper. _FENNHOFF_ was what he wrote, in shaky block capital letters. And that—Sam knew that name, Sam had seen that somewhere—

“Think that’s all I can manage. Everything else is—all mixed up,” whispered Bucky.

“That’s good, that’s perfect, you did so good, Bucky,” said Sam, because that was it, that was what Sam had needed. Bucky wrapped his arms around Sam and Sam held him tight, running a hand through his hair until he stopped shivering with the aftershock of whatever memory he’d wrestled to the ground, and until he relaxed into sleep. Which was nice, it was great, but Bucky was heavy and effectively pinning him to the couch with how he was wrapped around him, and Sam needed to go run down this intel.

Fennhoff. He’d seen the name before, in conjunction with Zola’s. And there’d been something else, something about what they’d replaced Fennhoff’s work with. Sam had only seen that in passing, in a hard copy file somewhere, but he was abruptly certain that that was it, that was the key. Sam managed to get his phone out of his pocket without disturbing Bucky, and he texted Steve. Steve came rushing in within minutes.

“What, what is it?”

“Your BFF cuddles like an octopus, help me shift him off, I’ve got a lead on how to fix the triggers,” Sam said, low and quiet so as not to wake Bucky.

“Oh thank god, you got him to sleep,” whispered Steve fervently as he eased Bucky off Sam and Sam slid off the couch, and thankfully Bucky didn’t wake, just made a grumpy, discontented noise before Steve tucked a blanket around him. Sam rushed off to his suite and his HYDRA-related notes, and Steve followed.

“So Bucky remembered something, and it made _me_ remember something. Fennhoff. Fennhoff was involved somehow.”

Steve frowned. “That name is familiar. He was one of the other Project Paperclip scientists, right? Died in the 60s, I think, before Zola, so looking into him was never a priority.”

“Bucky said it wasn’t that he didn’t _remember_ what they did to implant the triggers, but that he can’t _talk_ about it. And not, like, he doesn’t want to talk about it because it’s fucked up, but he _can’t_ , like some fairy tale curse shit. He fought through it and finally managed to write Fennhoff’s name down. And I saw Fennhoff’s name in the files in one of the bases I raided, something about how HYDRA had to replace Fennhoff’s work with something else. I didn’t think much of it at the time, it wasn’t in any file related to the Winter Soldier project, but if Bucky remembers him—”

“It might be what we’re missing about the trigger words,” Steve finished.

“Yeah.”

“Which base were the files in? Do we have them?”

Sam shook his head. “That would be the problem. It was hard copy, I remember that, but it was at one of the bases I had to ditch. I don’t know if one of the task forces followed up on it, and I’m not sure which base it even was.”

Steve and Sam had hit plenty of HYDRA bases on their own, looking for intel and taking out HYDRA heads that needed taking out. But some bases had required more manpower, or been abandoned, or had too many hazardous materials to safely destroy, and information on those had been passed along to anti-HYDRA task forces to deal with. Who knew if they’d gotten around to it. Sam shuffled through his notes.

“I think it’s got to be one of these,” said Sam, marking them. There were a handful of bases where Sam had had to leave files behind, or where he’d had to bail out early to stay alive.

Steve tapped one with his finger. “Not this one, Interpol cleared it a few months back, got rid of all the biohazards before they demolished it. No hard copy files. And Fury swept this one after you, he said it was all outdated bioweapon research.”

“Okay, so that leaves the base in Alberta, or the one in France,” said Sam.

“Alberta was that warehouse, wasn’t it?”

“Yeah, I remember I pulled some files from that warehouse, but I can’t remember if this Fennhoff reference I’m thinking of was there. And France was that abandoned castle, we ditched it because it was structurally unsound and about two seconds away from collapsing. Plus, a bunch of the files were water damaged.”

That one had been a shaky, long cold lead when he and Steve had first looked into it shortly before the whole mess with Ultron. It had been a moldering ruin of a castle in Alsace-Lorraine, abruptly abandoned by HYDRA for reasons unknown, and they’d only gone to check it out in case it had old HYDRA research about the serum or the Winter Soldier project. They’d found little other than graffiti and the remnants of squats, some old WWII era ordnance, and in the castle’s leaky and mildewed cellar, old wine bottles and water-damaged files. Sam and Steve had taken a quick look at the files and hadn’t spotted anything particularly relevant or new, so when Steve had heard some ominous groaning, they’d booked it out of the cellar just in time to watch part of the second story collapse into the first.

“Seems like a long shot, Sam. That base had been abandoned for decades, and there was no intel connected to the Winter Soldier project there. It’s been on the lowest priority list for cleanup since we found it.”

The logical, reasonable part of Sam agreed with Steve. It was a long shot and a half, but part of Sam was thinking, _abandoned castle_ and _breaking a curse_. He had a hunch that the answer they needed was there.

“I know. I’ve got a feeling though.”

“You’ve got a feeling, huh?” said Steve with that challenging smirk of his. “Alright, the Fennhoff lead is more solid than anything else we’ve got. Natasha or Fury will be able to get us access to anything pulled from the Alberta warehouse, or anything else the Avengers or SHIELD have on Fennhoff. We can get a hold of them and run down those files, see if they’re what we need.”

“I’ll head to France.”

“Sam—”

“Told you, I’ve got a feeling. C’mon, the place was abandoned. I’ve got fake papers, I can be in and out of France, easy as pie.”

“Yeah, and that place was falling apart too. Might not even be standing any more.”

“So I’ll engage in a bit of archaeology. It’ll take two, three days, max.” Sam crossed his arms, tried to exude calm confidence. Steve studied him carefully, something like worry or concern in his eyes.

“You know you don’t have to do this, right? I mean, we’ve found Bucky, this isn’t your mission or obligation or anything.”

“I know. But I want to. Feels like leaving the job half-finished, otherwise. And I want to help Bucky, if I can. He’s my friend too now.”

Steve smiled, relieved but still worried. “I’m glad. I’m just—worried.”

“It’ll be fine. It might come to nothing, but I’d go crazy with wondering if I didn’t check it out,” said Sam, because he would. The what-if of missing a potential cure for Bucky would rankle and fester, all the more if Sam was going to be walking around free and easy while Bucky got freezer burn in cryostasis.

Maybe he was setting himself up for disappointment, but he really did have a feeling about this lead. It felt right, right like following Steve into battle at the Triskelion, right like trusting his wings the moment his feet left the ground. He was sure this Fennhoff lead was the key they needed to unlock the fix for the trigger words.

 

* * *

 

They told Bucky the plan once he was up and looking more calm and settled again. He agreed that it was the best lead they had, but he was still giving them wide, worried eyes, his shoulders drawn up tight.

“I’ve just got to meet up with Fury for access to the files, Buck. It’s no big deal, nothing to worry about,” Steve reassured Bucky.

Sam added, “And the base I’m going to isn’t exactly manned full of HYDRA goons. It’s an abandoned castle, the most I have to worry about is some falling rocks. I’ll be plenty careful.” This was definitely an overly optimistic view, but he was trying to make Bucky feel better here.

“I don’t like that you’re both going alone,” said Bucky, frowning at them both.

Steve and Sam exchanged a very slightly guilty look. Sam decided to rip the bandaid off. There was no good in lying to Bucky, and also, Sam was maybe pathetically incapable of holding up against Bucky’s wide blue eyes of earnestness. He’d thought Steve’s puppy eyes were bad, but he now had a sneaking suspicion Steve had learned that look from Bucky in the first place, and Bucky was better at it. Sam tried to work up some resentment about how blatantly manipulative it was, and couldn’t manage it. He was pretty sure Bucky was wholly unaware of the effect of that look.

“Can’t risk getting caught together. It’s not likely we will be caught, but if we are…you know.” That just made Bucky look more worried. It was unbearable. Goddammit. Fuck it, Sam was gonna hug him. Bucky accepted the hug, but he huffed a little like he knew he was being humored. Sam just hugged him more firmly. Steve was raising amused eyebrows at both of them, and Sam ignored him. It wasn’t Sam’s fault Steve’s preferred method of dealing with mild disagreements was to bicker Bucky into submission. Sam preferred his method. “Seriously, don’t make with the big sad baby blue eyes at me, Barnes. This is nothing, we’ll both be here when you’re out of cryo.”

Steve had tried wheedling Bucky into staying out of cryo until they saw how this Fennhoff lead panned out, but Bucky had been firm: he was going back under, especially if Steve wasn’t going to be here to stop Bucky if something went wrong.

“Yeah, okay,” said Bucky when he pulled back from the hug. “Just—be careful, okay? Both of you. I’m gonna be annoyed if I have to bust you out of the Raft.”

“Of course we’ll be careful,” said Steve, and maybe he even meant it.

“Awww, you’d come bust me out of the Raft?” asked Sam.

“Yeah, y’know, once I’d cleared the rest of my busy schedule.”

“Uh huh, I see how it is. You’ll breeze in fifteen minutes late with Starbucks, after Steve and me have already knocked out the guards.”

Bucky blinked at him innocently. “But it’ll be fifteen minutes late with an iced venti soy mocha _for you,_ Sam.”

Sam wanted to laugh, but— “Wait, how do you know my Starbucks order?” Bucky smiled, suspiciously angelic. His eyes were awfully twinkly.

“I said you got real close in Belgrade. I never said when _I_ got real close to _you_.”

“You’re such an _asshole,_ oh my god—” Bucky just threw his head back and laughed and darted out of the way of Sam’s half-hearted lunge towards him. “Did you _counter-surveil_ me? Get back here, Barnes!”

 

* * *

 

A couple days after Bucky was back in cryo, Steve and Sam finalized the arrangements for their trips to retrieve the Fennhoff files. For Steve, it was just a matter of meeting up with Fury, and raiding an old SHIELD storage facility for the Fennhoff files, risky for him only because he was the most recognizable of all of them. Sam would have to take a somewhat circuitous route to France, entering the country by train so as to seem like any other American backpacker who was not at all a fugitive superhero. He’d check in with Lang and Wanda every six hours, and hop back on a commercial plane to Wakanda once he was done. Easy, so long as the castle itself wasn’t a death trap. It hadn’t entirely collapsed at least, judging by the most recent satellite imagery of the area.

Before he left, he stopped by the medical suite to see Bucky. He was as still and peaceful as he always was in cryo, and Hatshepsut was keeping him company, placidly cleaning herself in a patch of sunlight.

“Well, wish me luck,” he said to Bucky, or Hatshepsut, he wasn’t sure which. It wasn’t like either could answer.

Hatshepsut stopped cleaning herself and stared at him in that creepy way cats had. After a long moment she walked over to him and butted at his knee with her head. Sam knelt down in surprise and stretched out a tentative hand to stroke her head and tickle her under her funny little beard. She allowed it, purring, then turned, flicked him in the face with her tail, and returned to her post beside Bucky. Huh. Sam felt himself smiling. He’d take that as a good omen. It was ridiculous, but he felt weirdly warmed by Hatshepsut’s approval, buoyed by an unaccountable hope. He really did have a good feeling about this.

 

* * *

 

It took a full day and a half of traveling to get to the town closest to the castle, and from there Sam rented a bike to get to the castle itself. He had gear enough to camp out here for a few days, and probably no one would be unduly suspicious if they caught him at it. He could wave his fancy camera around and say he was here to take photos of some picturesque ruins at various times of day. He took photos on the way, even, only partly for his cover. The early autumn countryside was lovely as it was shedding its greenery, and the sky was very big, and very blue. On the bike, he could imagine he was flying if he kept his eyes trained on the sky.

When he got there, the ruins of the castle were only slightly more ruined than they had been when Steve and Sam had been there last. Sam checked the perimeter and found nothing more dangerous than a shy fox and some crumbling masonry. He made his way inside, alert to any suspicious creaking or groaning, but all he heard was birdsong and the hushed wave-like sound of the wind through the nearby trees. Sam wished he had Redwing with him. He could have sent the drone bird in before him to get the lay of the land, detect any signs of life. But Sam wasn’t really here as the Falcon, he was wingless and near weaponless, carrying nothing but the one gun he’d managed to smuggle through security, a taser, and some knives. He had some Wakandan-provided body armor on under his clothes at least, but he still felt vulnerable and next to naked.

The interior of the castle was dark, and Sam was no super soldier with enhanced vision, so he had a flashlight out in one hand, taser in the other, as he made his slow and steady way to the cellar where he’d seen the files. He stepped carefully, alert to any signs of the stone giving way under him, and kept up a sweep of the flashlight beam to illuminate the dark and dank space as best as he could. The beam of light revealed nothing more alarming than some gnarly spider webs and faded graffiti. Now that he was fully inside the castle, the silence of the place pressed at him with all the weight of the castle’s stones. There was water dripping somewhere, but other than that, Sam was the only thing making noise in here.

The cellar was even more damp than he remembered, and there were definitely some alarming bugs skittering around in there, maybe even some snakes. The row of rusted filing cabinets was still there though, so Sam ignored the creepy crawlies and started going through the files. The old notebooks were mildewed and water damaged, and a bunch of them weren’t what Sam was looking for at all: notes written in bursts of English and French on animal testing, chemical formulas, and jesus, some notes about crops and wine because even HYDRA scientists had day jobs, apparently. Some of the notebooks were too damaged to make heads or tails of, and the looseleaf papers that filled a couple of the drawers fell apart in Sam’s hands. Sam stopped, wracked his brain trying to remember just what it was he’d seen in these files, which drawer he’d looked in the first time he’d been here. They’d been going through them quickly, because Steve had already been antsy, super senses on high alert, so Sam had only taken a cursory look through the damaged documents before he’d gotten to the bottom drawer where—yes, there it was. A small stack of stained and swollen notebooks, the pages alternately damp and disgustingly crispy. He’d looked through the top one, maybe—

_Replacement for Fennhoff’s ability - effect recreated on subjects through pharmacological means?_ And then a string of chemistry stuff followed that Sam couldn’t make sense of. The few pages of incomprehensible to Sam notes ended with some crossed-out scribbles and Latin phrases, then _das brueire -_ _to test in lab,_ which, shit. Was there a lab here? Was it somewhere else? He flipped through the books as quickly as he dared. He didn’t see anything else relevant, just a lot of sketches of plants and notes on them, more chemical formulas. He wrapped up the notebooks and stowed them carefully in his pack.

_Das brueire:_ was that what had pinged his memory all those weeks ago? Briar, like the tangle of thorns and vines that had imprisoned Sleeping Beauty in her castle. Between that and this castle, maybe someone at HYDRA’d had a hard-on for fairy tales.

The last time he’d been here, he and Steve hadn’t had a chance to go through the whole castle. Once they’d cleared the perimeter and ground floor, the plan had been to search from the bottom up, but they hadn’t gotten further than the cellar before part of the castle had collapsed. If there was a lab, it might have more information. This place had been abandoned abruptly enough that something might be left. _Why was it abruptly abandoned though_ , Sam couldn’t help but wonder, _why has it been empty all this time_ , and unease shivered down his spine. He had to check though. He was here now, and if he didn’t, if this wasn’t enough, he’d hate himself for leaving the job unfinished when he’d gotten so close. So he went back upstairs.

There was nothing on the first floor but the old remnants of squats and trash they’d found the first time there. The only new addition was the collapsed portion of the second story, a dusty mess of stonework and broken wood. Sam crept upstairs, silent like that would keep the floor from collapsing under him. The rooms upstairs looked like they might have been looted, empty as they were, and the ceiling was leaking. Two empty rooms and one bathroom of horrors later, he reached a heavy wooden door, still intact, and still locked judging by how it wasn't giving way no matter how Sam jiggled the ornate handle or shoved against it. He heard a skittering noise and he whipped around, taser up, but he didn’t see anything. Probably just rats. _Hopefully_ just rats.

He contemplated the door. _What would Cap do?_ Bash it open with the shield, probably. Or kick it down. Sam didn’t have the shield, and kicking the solid, thick wood seemed like a good way to break his foot. He peered at the lock. He could try picking it, but it looked old. It might be rusted shut. If this were a video game, he’d have to go hunt for the key. Sam was not about to go hunting through an entire crumbling castle for one tiny key. Real life had no save points if he got himself impaled on a wooden beam or crushed by masonry when he fell through the floor. He examined the door’s hinges instead. He had some tools with him, he could try to knock the hinges out. He made an attempt, but they didn’t come loose.

He stopped, considered the castle’s layout. There were second story windows. He’d seen them when he’d checked the perimeter. He closed his eyes, brought up the mental image of the castle’s exterior. Yeah, that was an option. He went back downstairs and outside, and walked around to where he thought the room with the locked door should be. There was a window there, and the climb up to it looked easy enough, with plenty of handholds in the old stone. Though a Rapunzel letting down her hair would have been pretty damn helpful right about now.

Sam set his heavy pack down, shoving what he needed in his pockets and belt, and started the climb. There were a few dicey moments, and it was a hell of a workout, but he got up to the window where he could wedge himself into the recessed window sill while he looked for a way in. It was locked, of course, and the glass was thick, clouded over and grimy so Sam couldn’t see into the room, but Sam had just enough space to brace himself and aim a couple strong kicks into the glass. The force it took jolted him up to his hips, but the glass did give way with an almighty clatter and shattering, and Sam squeezed through the opening, nicking himself a few times on the way.

Once he’d swept the flashlight around the room some, he murmured, “Jackpot.”

It was the lab. It wasn’t anything like the more sterile and industrial labs he’d raided in other HYDRA bases; this looked more like some hobbyist’s combination lab and craft room. There was dusty glassware all around, boards with faded papers tacked up to them, long-dead and dry plants hanging from planters. He had a mental image of some gentleman eccentric puttering around in here, dripping this or that into bubbling beakers. Sam shook the image off and set to poking around for more files or notebooks. There were shelves and cabinets of mysterious substances and vials that Sam left alone, and ah ha, a shelf of books. Moldy and dusty reference books on plants, on drugs, on folk remedies….and there, some handwritten notebooks.

Sam heard another skittering noise, or not skittering, _dragging,_ a dry shuffling sort of noise, and his heart kicked into high gear. He looked up, looked around, but didn’t see anything. _Just rats or some other wild animal_ , he told himself, but he flipped through the books quickly, skimming as fast as he could for any sign that this was what he was looking for so he could get the fuck out of there. And oh no, there was definitely a thumping sort of noise coming from the general vicinity of the door now. What the fuck was in this castle? He kept reading, a little frantic now. And there, midway through the third book: _Fennhoff - suggestibility, suppression of natural will, trap for mind…._ more notes followed, the words _briar_ and _brueire_ popping up every so often. Right, this had to be it, thought Sam, and then something broke through the door.

Sam had enough presence of mind to chuck the books out the window, and then pull out his gun, and in those brief seconds the thing had nearly crossed the room to him. Sam had an impression of scales and flapping before he took aim to shoot at it, and it hissed and spat, but retreated. It was about half his size, and it was—jesus fuck, it was some sort of lizard dragon thing. Sam nearly burst into hysterics right then and there. _Should’ve brought a sword!_

He took aim at the thing’s head and fired off another couple rounds that mostly missed, but did seem to distract it, so Sam walked backwards to the window, firing off another shot, center mass this time, before he shoved his gun in his pants and climbed out the window to begin his frantic descent.

He deeply missed his wings at that moment, more maybe than he ever had before, because he definitely couldn’t climb down fast enough to avoid that lizard thing, a fact that became all too apparent when it flopped its head out the window and screeched at Sam in rage, lunging off of the window sill. Sam fumbled one-handed for his gun, grabbed it, and managed a couple shots that just bounced off the stone exterior of the castle before he was out of rounds. He let the gun drop to the ground, still some twenty feet below him. The one arm supporting him was burning with effort, so he switched arms to grab his knife, and stabbed blindly at the lizard dragon thing’s head when it next lunged for him. He managed to get it in the eye so he used the creature’s pained distraction to climb down another few feet before he had to fend it off with another wild stab. Another couple rounds of this and he was close enough to the ground to risk jumping off and rolling when he hit the ground.

With a couple flaps of its small wings, the dragon lizard thing joined Sam on the ground and stalked slowly towards him. It was bleeding in a few places where Sam had managed to get good hits in, and blood was streaming from one of its eyes. Sam considered his options. _Okay, okay, you don’t have a sword, Wilson. You’ve got a knife and your wits, and a real pretty princess waiting for you to go back to the palace with the magical antidote. Time to kill this motherfucking dragon_. Dragon was overstating it, probably. It really was fairly small, and it had yet to breathe fire. Up close it looked like a cross between an ornery featherless turkey and a skinny gator. What was it people always said about wild animals? It’s more scared of you than you are of it? Sam didn't know if that applied to probable HYDRA mutants, but whatever. It was a worth a shot.

He drew himself up big and waved his arms around, shouting, and took threatening steps towards the thing. “Hey! You are no dragon, you little mutant turkey! You can’t hurt me! I am the Falcon!” Sam felt ridiculous, but it seemed to be working. The thing was shying back with every shout. Sam gave a few menacing and showy swipes of his knife. It jumped back. “Yeah, that’s right, you should be scared! Go on now, get back in that creepy castle!”

Astonishingly, this worked, or maybe the lizard thing just gave up on Sam being an easy meal, because it squawked and flapped its awkward way back up to the window and into the castle. Sam grabbed the books he’d tossed out the window, and his gun and pack, and jogged back to where he’d left his bike. Before he started the ride back to town, he had to take a moment to burst into breathless, hysterical laughter. So he hadn’t quite slain the dragon, but he hopefully had the building blocks for a cure for the curse, and he wasn’t dead. Yeah, he’d Prince Charming’d the shit out of this.

 

* * *

 

Sam got back to Wakanda without incident, only lightly banged up from his run-in with the dragon lizard thing. Steve was back already too, and he’d found some potentially helpful intel on Fennhoff in the SHIELD files. They both left it all with Dr. Njue and her team, and proceeded to hover around the medical suite.

“Should we get him out of cryo, just to let him know we got back safely? He was really worried,” said Steve.

“Yeah, we can tell him we found the intel on Fennhoff,” said Sam.

Dr. Njue suppressed a smile and gave them a stern look. “How about we review the documents first, to see if this is the information we need?”

“This had better be the information we need, I defeated a _dragon_ for this.”

Steve squinted at him with suspicion. “Was it really a dragon? Why am I getting the feeling you’re fucking with me?”

Weird mutant gator-turkey that Sam had mildly injured didn’t have quite the same ring to it as “dragon.” “It was definitely a dragon, and I definitely defeated it. In a castle. With a _knife_.”

Dr. Njue and her team spent a week poring over the documents Steve and Sam had brought back. Fennhoff was indeed the key for the information they’d been missing. He’d had some creepy ability to make people do what he wanted them to do according to the SHIELD files, something like hypnosis, and had even done it to Howard Stark once. This, it seemed, had been the foundation for the programming of the trigger words. Once Fennhoff had died, and as Bucky had kept fighting back, HYDRA had needed new methods to reinforce the control. This was where the “pharmacological means” in the notes Sam had recovered came in. This drug was only referenced as “das brueire” in the files Steve got from SHIELD, after some thorny vine the HYDRA scientist had extracted the drug’s main ingredient from and _not_ because of some weird fairy tale analogy apparently, and it had been used on other HYDRA assets too, just another weapon in their arsenal of control.

They consulted with their resident witch. Wanda looked over the Fennhoff files, clearly disturbed.

“I can’t _make_ someone do something, I don’t think. Visions, nightmares, sure, but overriding someone’s will—” she shook her head. “That is not something I’m willing to meddle with. I think we can all agree my prior efforts at messing with people’s minds didn’t go well,” she said with a wan and bitter smile.

“Could you observe though? In Bucky’s mind?” asked Dr. Njue, gaze gone distant. She’d thought of something, clearly.

Wanda frowned, tapped her fingers on the table. “Yes. Yes, I think so.”

“Would you be willing to?”

“If Bucky is alright with it.”

Dr. Njue nodded, and jotted down some notes, pleased.

“So, bottom line, can we disable the triggers with this information?” asked Steve.

“I can see how the triggers were programmed now. It is, perhaps, not as bad as we had feared, in some respects. If it had been solely brute force conditioning, reinforced with the wipes, we might have been left with only brute force methods of disabling the triggers: extinction therapy, repeated exposure, that sort of thing. This drug though…we are still studying it, but if it was used to induce the state that allowed for the programming of the triggers, there’s the possibility it would work the other way around. We’ve formulated it successfully, based on the notes you found, Mr. Wilson. It needs more study.”

The doctors kept studying. Steve and Sam were utterly superfluous for this part, about as helpful as Hatshepsut, and far less patient. When it was time to revive Bucky, their plan of action was distressingly vague: essentially, administer the drug, and see what happened. “We need to get readings,” Dr. Njue said, a little apologetically. “And see what Wanda can determine.”

Bucky was visibly relieved when he was awake and aware enough to see Steve and Sam safe and unharmed. When they told him what the plan was, such as it was, he shrugged philosophically, expression placid and only a little worried. _Might as well give it a shot_ , said the wry curve of his mouth.

So they did. They administered the drug, Bucky restrained on the bed, and Wanda with one careful hand laid against his forehead and temple, red flickering like lightning between her fingers. To Steve and Sam’s anxious eyes, nothing much seemed to be happening. Bucky’s eyes were closed, eyelids fluttering like he was dreaming. Wanda frowned, a line of concentration furrowing her brow, her eyes closed too. Dr. Njue asked a few careful questions, her voice gentle: _what’s your name, do you know where you are, do you feel safe, do you remember the trigger words, can you tell me what they are?_ Bucky was calm until the last question, when he started shaking his head and muttering _no no no no no_. Wanda’s frown deepened.

“What, are we just going to ask him, ‘can you deprogram yourself’?” wondered Sam.

Turned out, that was basically the plan.

“Are you shitting me?” asked Sam when Dr. Njue revealed this, after the trial run with the drug was over. Bucky just tilted his head, considering.

“No, I am not, Mr. Wilson. Just as the drug allowed for the programming of the triggers, so it can be used to deprogram them. According to Ms. Maximoff, the words are there in Bucky’s mind, separate from his self. The drug allows for a state of mind that can allow him to confront them, manipulate them himself. Since we, of course, will not be torturing him or enforcing compliance, we can instead guide him towards dismantling the triggers on his own. It’s a little like the enhanced hypnosis Fennhoff used, only Bucky will remain in control.”

Wanda nodded. “The words are like…traps, in his mind. Or a prison. Made out of…well, memories, I suppose. Memories linked to the words. If he confronts those, destroys the links to the triggers….”

“He’s free,” concluded Steve.

“Yes,” said Dr. Njue. “Whether it works or not, we will have to try it and see, but I think there’s a good chance, and this is at least low risk, on a physical level. The drug is safe, as these things go, so long as we keep Bucky hydrated and ensure his temperature doesn’t climb dangerously high.”

“Oh, good, so it’s just like ecstasy then,” said Sam. Everyone ignored him.

“Okay, let’s try it,” said Bucky.

“You sure about this, Buck?” asked Steve.

“Yeah. I’m sure.” He gave Steve a smile that was probably meant to be reassuring, but that mostly looked anxious. He turned back to Dr. Njue. “Who’ll do the guiding? How will we know if it works?”

“I will do the guiding,” said Dr. Njue. “And Ms. Maximoff will be able to take a peek in your mind every so often, to see how—or if—we are progressing.”

Bucky took in a deep breath, nodded. “Let’s do it then.”

“I defeated a dragon for this,” said Sam, to no one in particular.

“So you’ve mentioned. I’m very grateful,” said Bucky with an indulgent smile. He tilted his head, narrowed his eyes at Sam. “Were you….expecting some other fix for the trigger words?”

And yeah, maybe Sam was. He did not much like this plan. He didn’t know just what he’d been expecting, but it hadn’t been this. This seemed vague as hell, and he’d noticed that while Dr. Njue had specified it was low-risk physically speaking, she hadn’t said anything about Bucky’s mental safety. To Sam, it sounded like they were sending Bucky on a bad drug trip and hoping for the best. Urban legends and horror stories about acid and shrooms made Sam feel pretty fucking wary about that. Everyone knew a guy who knew a guy who knew some hippie who’d burned out their mind on one too many rounds of acid. Everyone except for Bucky and Steve, guessed Sam. And if Sam were Bucky’s peer counselor, he’d say this was the wrong call, he’d caution more research, more careful consideration. But he wasn’t Bucky’s peer counselor, and this was far from a normal situation.

Sam crossed his arms and tried not to shift uncomfortably under Bucky’s sharp eyes. “We know a witch! I uncovered the recipe to a mystery cursed potion! Yeah, I was expecting something other than ‘it’s time for Bucky to go on a vision quest.’ We sure this isn’t gonna leave him worse off if this ends up being the equivalent of a really bad trip?” he asked Dr. Njue.

“I have faith in Bucky’s mental resilience,” said Dr. Njue, smiling at Bucky. “Take today to rest up and prepare yourself as best you can, Bucky. We’ll start tomorrow.”

 

* * *

 

Both Steve and Sam were there the next day when it was time to begin the process of disabling the triggers. At Bucky’s earnest insistence, they’d set up a secure room, complete with restraints for Bucky, and an observation room in case it was too unsafe for anyone to stay in there with him. It was all more sterile and prison-like than was comfortable, but Sam couldn’t deny the prudence of it. They couldn’t be sure how Bucky would react, and he might hurt himself or someone else without even meaning to while he was tripping balls.

“You two don’t have to be here for this whole thing,” called out Bucky as the IV drip started.

“We’re here for moral support, Bucky,” said Steve over the intercom, and fuck, he was serious about that. He had the jaw clench of righteousness and everything. Sam had kind of planned to just be here at the beginning, make sure everything went alright, but if Steve had decided Bucky needed moral support for his bad trip, then Sam had to at least stick around to be moral support for the moral support.

“Okay, well that's nice and all, but I’m gonna be too out of it to know or care. Sam, don’t let him stay here the whole time!”

Well, now Sam was definitely gonna stay there the whole time. “What am I, the Steve-minder? You focus on your journey of the mind or whatever, we’re cool out here.”

Steve gave him a somewhat affronted look, which, whatever. Sam was keeping things cool so Bucky didn’t freak the fuck out like Sam could see he kind of wanted to in the tight lines around his eyes. 

“I love you and I believe in you, Buck. You can do this,” said Steve.

Geez. Sam knew Bucky couldn’t see him through the window, but he shot an “ugh, this guy,” look at him anyway, and felt inexplicably warmed when he saw Bucky doing the same thing right back.

“Don’t make this weird, Steve,” said Bucky, but he was starting to look hazy, and his eyes began to flutter closed.

After that, Bucky’s not-that-magical psychoactive trip began in earnest, and he and Steve were relegated to pacing the observation room as Dr. Njue’s calm and steady voice guided Bucky to the first trigger word. It was harder than maybe either of them had reckoned to watch Bucky take on so private a war, Bucky’s face set in something between terror and agony as he tossed and thrashed against the restraints while he fought his own mind and relived horrors. Dr. Njue kept relentless focus on the words and the awful memories associated with them, and it was up to Bucky to break the mental traps the words represented.

The minutes stretched to hours, the hours to days, with Bucky locked in battle with those ten cursed words buried in his own mind. Every few hours, Sam dragged Steve out of the observation room as promised, but neither of them were especially up for staying focused on their own work when they both knew what hell Bucky was enduring on his own. Dr. Njue gave Bucky breaks where he was off the drug, but even then he was still out of it, flushed and feverish, not really tracking. It was all they could do to get him to eat some food, and they’d given up on hydrating him with anything but IV fluids. It wasn’t giving Sam a ton of confidence in how safe this was. Hatshepsut agreed with him, judging by how she prowled the observation room.

But it was working. According to Wanda, it was working, the trigger words becoming inert and useless, one by one.

On day three, it was Sam’s turn to sit with Bucky during one of his breaks off the drug. He was five words down, and five words to go, which Sam had to remind himself was good progress. It was hard, when faced with Bucky’s feverish, glazed over eyes, the lines of pain etched on his face. He looked worse than he had coming out of spinal surgery. They took the vibranium-enforced restraints off when he wasn’t drugged, at least. It was scarcely enough time for the line of deep bruising on his right arm that likely extended across his chest to start healing up.

“Hey Bucky, you’re halfway there, huh? Doing good, man.” Bucky just stared at him, clearly confused. There wasn’t much recognition in his eyes. Sam’s stomach sank. “It’s me, Sam.”

“Wings,” said Bucky, voice hoarse.

“Yeah. Yeah, that’s me, the Falcon. With the wings.” Now was probably not the time to bring up that time Bucky had ripped said wings off. “You mind if I sit with you a bit?”

“Okay.”

Sam rambled on at Bucky for a while, just to fill the silence, and tried a tentative touch or two to his forehead, his hair, that Bucky didn’t much react to. It made Sam feel a little desperate for some indication that Bucky was in there, that once this was over, he’d smile and give Sam shit and submit to hugs with annoyed little huffs even as he held on tight. The prospect of that seemed very distant just now. Sam wound down his rambling about Lang’s solo heist to retrieve the plans for the Raft, and subsided into silence. Bucky was curled up on his side, staring with half-open eyes at nothing in particular.

“You need some sleep, Bucky? Want me to leave you alone?”

Bucky shook his head. “Can you—before, after I got out of cryo you—played some music, can you—?”

“Yeah, yeah, of course,” said Sam, and pulled out his phone. He set Marvin Gaye to play again, mind blank of any other options. It seemed like he should play something calming or downbeat, but maybe that would just bring Bucky down.

“You wanna try to get some sleep?” asked Sam, after a few songs, when Bucky seemed to be fighting his own heavy eyelids. Sam wasn’t sure sleep would help any. The second Bucky fell asleep, he started dreaming, eyes moving restlessly under his his closed eyelids. It didn’t seem restful.

“Doesn’t help. Tired,” said Bucky, voice barely audible. Sam swallowed hard, his throat aching.

“I know, sweetheart.” The endearment came out unbidden, like he said it all the time. Bucky didn’t react to it one way or the other. Sam pressed a hand to Bucky’s overheated forehead, stroked his hair a little. “You’re almost done, though, okay? Stay strong for a little bit longer. You just have to keep fighting for a little bit longer.”

Bucky made a small wounded noise at that, but he closed his eyes and leaned into Sam’s touch. God, how many people had told Bucky to just keep fighting a little longer, it would be over soon, just one more mission? It was a bullshit platitude, the kind of thing Sam had told guys when he was holding their guts in, or staunching bleeding he couldn’t stop, or applying tourniquets to limbs he wouldn’t be able to save. If Sam had felt useless then as a pararescue, a trained medic who was some guys’ last and only hope, he felt exponentially more so now. This was no battlefield Sam could rescue Bucky from.

 

* * *

 

If Steve and Sam had harbored some hopes that it’d be an easier downhill stretch to deal with the last few trigger words, those hopes died a pretty swift death soon enough. Around word seven, Bucky started screaming. Steve nearly broke down the door trying to get to Bucky, and Sam held him back against even his own instincts. Hatshepsut stopped her prowling around the observation room and yowled in sympathy.

“There’s nothing for us to fight, Steve, c’mon. He’s gotta do this, there’s nothing we can do.”

“Is this any better than what they did to him?” asked Steve, voice ragged.

“We knew it wasn’t going to be easy,” said Sam.

Some part of him had hoped it would be though, that Wakanda, in all its glittering advancement, would have had some miracle cure. If these trigger words were a curse, Sam had hoped, a little, that the breaking of them would have been the stuff of fairy tales too: a touch of Wanda’s scarlet magic, a series of words to undo the trigger words, a magical potion. But it was all down to Bucky, and they all just had to hope that he was strong enough to bear it, to overcome HYDRA’s last grasping grip on him. Sam didn’t know how the hell Bucky would do it. Sam was barely strong enough to watch.

Once Bucky broke through the seventh word, Dr. Njue gave him another break, maybe just as much for her own sake as his. Her skin had gone a little ashen, heavy bags lingering under her eyes. Bucky was doing most of the work, but she had to keep guiding him to the trigger words, keep him from getting lost in the tangled and jagged mess of his memories of his time with HYDRA.

“Just three more words,” she told Bucky, once he was lucid enough. “Do you want to take a longer rest?”

Bucky gave an exhausted shake of his head. “No. Want it done with.”

So they kept going. Around word eight, Bucky stopped being lucid in between doses of the drug. He only intermittently recognized Steve, and didn’t know Sam at all, but they stayed with him anyway, gave up on leaving the observation room or medical suite except when they absolutely had to. They couldn’t do much other than keep reassuring Bucky he was safe, it was okay, he was doing so well and he was almost done, just a little longer, just keep fighting a little longer. When he shuddered and shook, chanting _not real not real not real_ , they got in the bed with him, held on tight, reassured him they were really there, that there’d be someone waiting when this was all over, that he wasn’t alone.

Steve took this part hardest of all. It was no picnic for Sam either, but Bucky’s awful, despairing certainty that Steve was dead, that Steve wasn’t ever going to come for him, that this time Bucky could not hope for any rescue from HYDRA, turned Steve into a guilt-ridden mess. Steve could only cling to a shaking Bucky, and say over and over again, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m here this time, I swear, I’m not leaving you.”

Sam should probably enforce some self-care time, for both of them, but leaving Bucky like this felt crueller than even what they were already making him endure. Wanda took to staying with them after she checked on Bucky’s progress with the words, and she kept a tight grip on Steve’s hand, bringing all the calm certainty she’d fought so hard for to bear.

“He is so strong, Steve. He’s going to get through this. We’re nearly done now. Just two words left,” she said.

At word nine, Bucky went horribly, terrifyingly silent, save for the too-fast panting of his breaths. For an awful stretch of time, Sam was sure that something had broken beyond repair in Bucky, that he wasn’t going to come back from this. But Wanda pressed a hand to Bucky’s forehead, and said, “He’s in there, he’s alright,” and a few hours later, she said he’d done it, he’d broken through the ninth trigger word.

Bucky actually slept for a few hours after that, and Steve and Sam staggered off to take showers and get some rest of their own, leaving Bucky with Hatshepsut stationed by his head, purring like she could vibrate the last trigger word out of his head. It had been nearly a week since they’d started this process.

When Bucky was awake again, he seemed to have regained some energy, some lucidity. Bucky looked at Sam and actually saw him, and the relief that slammed into Sam at that nearly made him weak at the knees.

“So this is the worst drug trip ever, am I right?”

Bucky let out a weak chuckle. It was maybe the best thing Sam had heard in days. Steve got literally teary-eyed on hearing it. “Pretty much. Hey, don’t make that face, Steve. It’s alright. Almost done.”

Steve’s face did an alarming collapsing sort of thing for a second before he got control of himself. “Is this what it was like all those times you stayed up with me when I was half-dead and delirious with a fever? Because this is the worst, Buck.”

“I dunno, your delirious ravings were kind of funny sometimes,” murmured Bucky, closing his eyes for a moment, like he was too exhausted to keep them open.

Steve laughed, pressed a grateful kiss to Bucky’s forehead. “Jerk.”

Dr. Njue came in with an IV bag. Her stern expression lightened when she saw Bucky up and talking. “One last dose, Bucky. Just one more word, and you’re free.”

Bucky clenched his eyes shut tight, and a heartwrenching, mostly swallowed down sob escaped him. Sam wanted to immediately find a dragon to kill, a HYDRA agent to shoot, anything, because hearing Bucky make that hopeless sound made him more helplessly angry than he could stand. Instead he took hold of Bucky’s hand and squeezed, in some vain attempt to give him the strength to get through the last of this hell. God, what were they doing to him? There must have been a better way to do this.

“Jesus christ, we can’t keep doing this to him,” said Steve, looking desperate and wild around the eyes.

“I’m sorry, if you’re not ready, we can wait—”

“No, don’t. I want to finish this. I can do this. Please,” said Bucky, disciplining his expression back from despair to resolve, even as his voice shook. Fuck, they should have found a better way to do this. But they hadn't, and this was their best hope now. Bucky would have to see it through.

 

* * *

 

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the last word proved the hardest to break. It took all day and all night, Bucky reduced to repeating his name, rank and serial number until his voice gave out, just as he must have done when HYDRA had first had him, and then he was too deep in his own head for anything Steve or Sam said to get through to him. He went quiet again, too still, almost as if he was in cryo. Sam maybe stared especially hard at the rise and fall of his chest, just in case he—well, just in case. But Wanda said he was fighting hard in there, so they kept vigil.

Sometime around dawn, when Steve and Sam had collapsed against each other, sitting against the wall in a light doze, and Wanda had fallen asleep curled up in her chair, Bucky came to with a gasp. Everyone startled awake with a violent jerk, and Sam could even hear a thump from the observation room as Dr. Njue presumably jumped in her chair or dropped something in surprise.

“I think I’m done,” rasped Bucky. “It’s done, can you—”

Steve stumbled over to Bucky, unceremoniously shoving Sam off him while Sam groaned and popped his sore back. Bucky seemed fine, maybe he’d just stay here on the floor.

“Hey Buck,” said Steve, and eased the bed up. “Here, have some water.” Bucky drank thirstily while Wanda rested gentle fingers against his temple. Red flickered eerily between her fingers, and reflected and flashed in Bucky’s eyes for a few seconds.

“I think—I think he’s right,” she said.

Dr. Njue came in, lab coat wrinkled and askew. “Bucky, how are you feeling?”

“Um, terrible, can you, can someone try the words—” Bucky was wiggling against the restraints, wincing at the motion.

Sam levered himself up from the floor, groaning, no help from Steve, the asshole. “Slow the fuck down, Bucky, rewind and go back to ‘terrible,’” said Sam.

He peered at Bucky, who was generally stubbly and unwashed looking and whose cheekbones were looking especially sharp after basically a week stuck in a bed barely eating anything, but he was otherwise bright-eyed and rosy-cheeked and looking more present than he had since this whole hellish ordeal had started. It wasn’t exactly Snow White waking from her cursed sleep, but Sam kind of felt like it was.

Bucky glared at him, which was honestly kind of a relief, and pretty thoroughly punctured his whole Snow White delusion. “I’m starving and everything hurts and I’m really fucking tired, seriously, someone try the words already.”

“The king said we must take additional precautions should we attempt that,” said Dr. Njue, sticking a fresh drug-free IV bag on the stand and undoing Bucky’s restraints. “I’ll let him know we are ready to try. Now everyone out, let me see to my patient.”

Wanda darted in for a quick peck to Bucky’s cheek and dimpled sweetly at him. Bucky’s grumpy expression lifted as he smiled back at her. “You’re going to be just fine,” she said.

Bucky caught her hand before she could go. “Thank you,” he said, low and sincere, and they shared some sort of meaningful, you’ve-been-in-my-head stare.

Then Dr. Njue shooed them all out, leaving Steve and Sam staring at each other blearily in the hallway. 

“Shower and breakfast?” suggested Steve.

Sam scrubbed his face with his hand. His eyes felt like they were full of sand, and his whole body ached with a week’s worth of tension. And they weren’t even quite done yet. Bucky surely had it worse, but Sam was feeling pretty awful right now himself.

“Yeah. That’s a start.”

 

* * *

 

When they rejoined Bucky in the medical suite a couple hours later, he was sitting up, and a tray with the ruins of an impressively big meal was being cleared away. His hair was still wet from the shower, and he was practically radiating nervous anticipation.

Sam plopped himself on the side of the bed and said, “Chill, Bucky. It’s still ass o’clock in the morning, you can wait a little longer to see if you’re still ten words away from being a murderbot.” He gave Bucky a careful sideways hug, mindful of the still-healing bruises he could see along his right arm, and Bucky leaned into Sam, groaning into his shoulder in frustration.

“Don’t tell me to chill, I spend most of my time frozen as it is.” Steve winced, but Sam laughed, because it was true, and also Bucky sassing him was a welcome change from the last week.

“Feeling less terrible now?” asked Steve, perching on the other side of the bed.

“I really want to sleep. Like, actual sleep. Also I think I’m still a little high.”

And yeah, maybe he was. Bucky was being a little freer with his words than he usually was. Sam peered at Bucky’s eyes, and his pupils were still blown kind of big. Or maybe he was just the kind of wired and loopy that came from hitting your last reserve of energy before you crashed. Sam knew the feeling. He wasn’t far from it right now, though coffee had given him a pretty strong second wind.

“Hold out just a little longer,” said Steve. “We’ve gotta round up some of the Dora Milaje, and then T’Challa wants to be here when we test the trigger words, just in case.”

“Okay, but fair warning, I might just pass out if this takes too long,” Bucky said, scowling, but his face brightened when he spotted Hatshepsut trotting into the room, carrying something in her mouth. Was that a banana? Sam squinted at her. It was a banana.

Hatshepsut hopped up to the bed in one easy leap, and deposited the banana on Bucky’s lap with an encouraging sort of chirp.

“She brought you _food_? Like, actual people food, not a dead rat?” boggled Steve. Bucky just beamed at the cat and wrapped her up in a hug, which she happily submitted to for a moment before wriggling out of Bucky’s arms and batting the banana closer towards him.

“That for me, sweetheart?” Hatshepsut meowed, butted her head at Bucky’s stomach gently. “Yeah, I was pretty hungry earlier. Still am, a little." Hatshepsut patted at his hand with her paw, as if to encourage him to peel the banana. Bucky laughed and dropped a kiss to the top of her head. "You’re the best, smartest cat,” he declared, and then said, solemn and sincere like she was a person and not a goddamned cat, “Thank you. And thank you for this past week, too.” Hatshepsut blinked and purred like this was only her due. Bucky peeled the banana and ate it, to Hatshepsut’s apparent approval and satisfaction.

Sam couldn’t believe this shit. “That cat has adopted you. This dangerous, wild animal thinks you are a giant hairless baby.”

“Does not,” said Bucky, mouth still full of banana.

“Gross, Barnes! Close your damn mouth when you’re eating, I don’t need to see that. And she totally does.”

Bucky swallowed, elbowed Sam a little. “Does not. We’re friends. Aren’t we, Hatshepsut?” he asked, scratching her under her little bearded tuft of hair. She closed her eyes in pleasure and purred louder.

“If this was any other cat, I’d say you were a crazy cat person,” said Sam, grim, as he observed the, fuck it, beautiful human-animal friendship happening right in front of him.

“Clearly, I gotta watch out for my place in the best friend hierarchy here,” said Steve with a wry grin, reaching out to pet Hatshepsut.

Bucky blinked at Steve, wide-eyed. “Of course you don’t. You’re my favorite person, Steve. Hatshepsut is my favorite cat.”

“Oh, you are definitely still a little high,” said Steve, laughing, but he looked pleased as he bumped Bucky with his shoulder. “But thanks, Buck.”

“Hey, what am I, chopped liver?” asked Sam. Bucky blushed bright red, which, _interesting_. Also, absolutely fucking adorable.

Before Bucky could elaborate on where exactly Sam stood in the friendship hierarchy (he hoped he ranked above the damned cat), T’Challa came in with Dr. Njue and four Dora Milaje guards. Without missing a beat, he pulled out his phone and snapped a picture of them before Steve and Sam could scramble to rise from their seats on either side of Bucky’s bed. Now all three of them were goddamn blushing. They all stammered out greetings to an amused looking T’Challa.

“Forgive me, it was too charming a tableau, with Hatshepsut, and you two on either side—” T’Challa stopped, cleared his throat. “Anyway, I was pleased to hear you might have been successful in the deprogramming of the trigger words. Are you ready to test the entire sequence?”

Bucky nodded fervently. “Please.”

They weren’t taking any security risks with potentially activating the Winter Soldier. Though Steve had argued he wouldn’t be a danger if he wasn’t given any orders, Bucky was justifiably terrified of hurting someone, and wasn’t willing to leave even the slightest chance of it, and T’Challa sure as hell didn’t want the Winter Soldier potentially loose in his palace. Sam was on Bucky and T’Challa’s side on this, having no desire to get a fateful of metal hand again. So Bucky would be restrained, much as he had been while he’d been breaking the triggers, and the Dora Milaje would stand ready to incapacitate him if he broke free. Dr. Njue would read the words, and from there it would be a matter of simple observation. Sam thought they’d all be able to tell easily enough if Bucky disappeared under the Winter Soldier’s relentless blankness.

Bucky started looking especially nervous once he was strapped into the upright gurney they usually used to put him in the cryostasis tube. Hatshepsut hissed in displeasure at the sight, her hackles rising. She looked ready to claw the Dora Milaje checking the restraints until T’Challa knelt down to have a serious little chat with her, because whatever. The cat needed reassuring, he guessed. The cat could understand the dangerous test they were about to attempt, or they were going to act like she could, and that was fine, because the King of Wakanda was the one talking to her.

“We will make every effort to only incapacitate you, if the Winter Soldier is triggered,” reassured Dr. Njue. Sam couldn’t tell if that was more for Bucky’s benefit, or for Steve’s.

Bucky blinked up at the ceiling, breathing deep. “Okay. But I mean, feel free to just kill me if this doesn’t work, because fuck if I’m doing any of that again.”

“Bucky!” cried Steve, horrified. Sam had to stifle an inappropriate, half-hysterical laugh.

“Haha. Just a joke,” added Bucky with a weak half-smile.

Once the Dora Milaje took their places, T’Challa gave Dr. Njue a nod, and Dr. Njue checked in with Bucky.

“Ready?” she asked.

“Yes.”

She began to recite the unfamiliar to Sam Russian words in a measured cadence. Bucky kept his eyes closed, a frown on his face. Once she was done, he shuddered a little in the restraints, but when he blinked his eyes open, he just looked like Bucky. A little confused, kind of spacey and dazed, but definitely Bucky, and not the Winter Soldier.

“Bucky?” asked Steve, stepping closer towards where Bucky was strapped on the gurney. Hope and joy were dawning on his face. Sam felt a near giddy relief bubbling up in his chest.

“Yeah. It’s me. I’m—it worked. Can you—?”

Dr. Njue said the words again, faster this time, and then again, to no effect. Bucky tipped his head back and laughed, breathless and open, and if there was anything less like the Winter Soldier, Sam couldn’t think of it. Steve fumbled the restraints open and wrapped Bucky up in a crushing hug, Bucky clinging just as tightly to Steve. Sam gave them a minute before turning it into a group hug situation. He couldn’t quite get both his arms around two muscled bulks of supersoldier, but he gave it a good effort. They all only pulled back when Bucky started to sway on his feet a little.

Some furtive wiping of eyes and sniffling happened and then Steve asked, “You okay, Bucky?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I really am. But I’m really, really fucking tired,” said Bucky and tipped against Steve like staying upright was too much effort.

“You need some proper rest,” diagnosed Dr. Njue. She laughed a little. “We all need some rest. Everyone get at least twelve solid hours of sleep, and we’ll reevaluate from there. Bucky, please stay in the medical suite in case you have any delayed reactions to the drug.”

After a round of thank yous and handshakes, Steve and Sam walked an already half-asleep Bucky over to his bed in the medical suite as T’Challa offered his congratulations and thanks to Dr. Njue and her medical team. By the time his head hit the pillow he was out, and Sam and Steve made a half-hearted effort to get the covers over him, but a sleeping Bucky proved difficult to move. Hatshepsut leapt up onto the bed and made herself at home, giving them a narrow-eyed sort of look that pretty clearly said, _okay, I’ll take over from here_.

“Alright. Hatshepsut’s got this,” said Sam, and even kind of meant it. “Time for both of us to follow the doctor’s orders.”

 

* * *

 

Sam tried to stay up until at least the afternoon in a vain attempt at getting his sleep schedule back in something resembling order, but he ended up effectively taking a series of long naps interspersed with meals. When he finally slept instead of napped, he was in bed until early afternoon the next day, which made him feel like he was a college student again, skipping his morning classes. Except in this case, it was a briefing on the status of the Accords that he’d skipped. Oh well. He’d get the notes from Lang.

Once they’d gotten their doctor-ordered twelve hours of sleep and then some, Steve and Sam went to check on Bucky, only to find Bucky still asleep.

“He got up to eat and use the bathroom early this morning, but then he went right back to sleep,” one of the nurses told them. “He’s fine though, Dr. Njue said to leave him be.”

“You’re a regular Sleeping Beauty, huh?” Sam told sleeping Bucky, but there was nothing delicate or princess-like about the way Bucky’s face was mashed into the pillow, or the absolute mess his hair was in, or how he was snoring quietly, mouth open a little. Sam had to admit, he preferred this all-too-human, messy look to the unnatural stillness of cryostasis, or the fevered and drugged tossing and turning of the past week.

The next day, Bucky was still asleep, which was getting a little concerning, but Dr. Njue wasn’t worried, only said he really did need the rest. Sam was, frankly, getting impatient for Bucky to wake the fuck up, and so was Steve. They’d fixed the trigger words! Bucky didn’t have to go back in cryo! Bucky now just had the, well, if not normal, at least traditionally manageable level of horrible trauma to deal with. And alright, he was still a fugitive, but so were all the rest of them, and they were at least inching closer and closer towards exoneration. In the meantime, Sam could have that space movie marathon with Bucky, or take him to the Wakandan observatory and planetarium, or make him try new fruits that hadn’t been on his list. _Those all sound like date-like activities_ , Sam’s brain informed him. Whatever.

When Steve and Sam went to check on him next, they stared at Bucky, now starfished across the bed on his stomach, one metal hand dangling off the side of the bed and the other hand shoved under the pillow, covers kicked off. Steve sighed, picked up the covers, and tucked them back around Bucky.

“Better than cryo, I guess,” said Steve in a low voice, trying to smooth Bucky’s hair back into a semblance of order. It was a lost cause. He grabbed a chair and sat down beside Bucky’s bed, apparently ready to stick around until he woke up.

“Are we just going to wait here, watching him sleep?” asked Sam, as if he and Steve had not done that very same thing all those long nights while Bucky was in cryo.

Steve pulled out his phone. “Well, _you_ can watch him sleep, I was planning to read some of these reports Natasha sent over.”

“Sleeping Beauty needs to wake the hell up already,” grumbled Sam as he pulled up a chair. He didn’t have anywhere else he especially had to be, might as well do his own reading here. He’d kept raiding Bucky’s stash of books, and now he was too deep in this series to turn back.

Steve looked up from his phone with a raised eyebrow and a smirk. “I thought that’s what true love’s kiss is for.”

“You planning on trying it?” asked Sam, because maybe Steve was the Prince Charming in this situation. He and Bucky sure did seem to have a pretty epic love story going. Steve just gave him a blank stare. So maybe it was a _platonic_ epic love story. “Guess that’s a no.”

“You could. Try it, that is.”

“What.”

Bucky stirred, changed positions. They froze, but Bucky didn’t wake, just curled up on his side and stayed asleep.

Sam glared at Steve, who shrugged and whispered, “Just saying.”

Did Steve know something? Had Bucky said something to him? Did Bucky like Sam? Sam was pretty sure Bucky liked him, there’d definitely been some flirting going on during all that cuddling. _Get a hold of yourself, Wilson, this isn’t high school_ , he told himself, and turned his attention back to his book.

Bucky finally woke up just when Sam got to the good part of his book, because it figured that even in this, he would find a way to annoy Sam.

“Do you two just really like watching me be unconscious or what?” asked Bucky, looking appallingly cheerful and well-rested, and ugh, handsome even with the rats’ nest hair.

“Good morning, sunshine. Or, not morning, early afternoon, because you have been asleep for like three days,” said Sam.

Bucky made a satisfied humming noise and stretched luxuriously. The movement made Bucky’s frankly excessive muscles flex in a deeply appealing way, and even the plates of his metal arm rippled in a wave. Fuck, it had been way too goddamn long since Sam had gotten laid if that was turning him on.

“Hey Buck, how’re you feeling?” asked Steve, favoring Bucky with a gentle smile.

“Great,” answered Bucky, with a smile that was way sweeter than it had any right to be on a guy that stubbly and muscled. “Hang on, I gotta piss,” he said and hurried off to the bathroom.

Steve rolled his eyes. “Yeah, he’s fine.”

When Bucky returned a few minutes later, he’d wrestled his hair into something like submission and he still had a vaguely beatific look on his face.

“I’m pretty sure that was the best sleep I’ve had in eighty years,” he said dreamily. “Hey, Steve, say the words.”

“What?”

“That happened, right? We fixed the triggers?” Bucky poked at Steve. “So say the words.”

“Buck—”

“C’mon, I know you know them, say it, say it, say it—”

“Ugh, fine,” said Steve, batting away Bucky’s poking hand. He made his halting way through the ten Russian words as Bucky stared at him expectantly. Just like before, nothing happened apart from Bucky flinching and shuddering a little.

“Your accent’s awful,” Bucky declared, but looked intensely relieved.

After one last examination, Dr. Njue gave Bucky the all-clear and let him go with a cheerful, “Now that you’re no longer in and out of stasis, we can start regular therapy!” Bucky didn’t seem thrilled about that, but he smiled and thanked her anyway.

 

* * *

 

Sam declared it was brunch time, even if it was actually more of a late lunch sort of hour, and they all ate a ridiculously large meal, with Lang and Wanda and even T’Challa stopping by to offer their congratulations to Bucky. Even Hatshepsut had reappeared from wherever it was she went off to when not fussing over Bucky, and Bucky spoiled her with little bites of sausage while she claimed his lap as her seat. She had, to Sam’s begrudging delight, greeted Bucky with the cat equivalent of a kiss to his nose. It was the cutest fucking thing Sam had ever seen, Hatshepsut stretching up to gently touch her nose to his, Bucky wrinkling his nose as he smiled and let her. Sam immediately snapped a photo of it and sent it to Natasha’s latest burner phone, providing no context. Her reply of _what the fuck is happening in Wakanda????_ came back minutes later. Sam just sent her a _:D_ in answer.

It was a good day, the best in a long while, everything bright and sweet with the promise of hope. Even when Steve had to go off to make a secure call to Maria Hill and Fury, the mood stayed fizzy and buoyant. They were getting close, now, to revealing and unwinding all the disastrous threads that had led to the vicious snarl of the Accords and Zemo’s attempt at vengeance. The Avengers might yet bring the band back together.

Once the meal was over, it was nearly evening, and Sam and Bucky were alone in Steve’s suite, which Sam supposed was Bucky’s suite too now that he wouldn't be spending most of his time in stasis. Hatshepsut was napping on one corner of the couch, and Sam and Bucky joined her once they’d cleared the remains of the meal up.

“Hey, thank you for finding the intel we needed, and for everything you did last week. I don’t know that I could have—” Bucky stopped, shook his head. “I know I’m not ever gonna be able to repay you for it, but—thank you. Really.” Bucky’s voice was rough and low, his blue-gray eyes devastatingly sincere. In the dim light of early evening, they were a rainy day kind of blue, soft and kind.

“All the hard parts were all you, man. You were strong as hell to get through it, and that’s something to be proud of, it really is. The rest of us just gave you a helping hand.”

Bucky smiled and looked down, shy. “Yeah, but I didn’t defeat a dragon.” He looked back up at Sam, grinning. “My hero,” he said, sly and teasing now.

“Okay, well, full disclosure, it maybe wasn’t a full-on _dragon_ ,” Sam admitted. “More of a….mutant turkey-gator hybrid thing. But you know, it was a castle, there were the ingredients to a mysterious potion….”

“Uh huh. You’re a regular knight in shining armor.” _Does that make you the princess?_ Sam wanted to ask, but he felt like he was giving a little too much away here as it was, and also, no. He was not extending this whole Disney delusion he had going. “So, I guess we’re taking on Ross soon, huh?” asked Bucky.

That was what Steve had gone to talk to Maria and Fury about. And yeah, they were, but it made Sam’s heart hurt to see Bucky steeling himself for yet another fight so soon, like they’d only helped him to get him back on the team as another weapon in a new war. That was maybe more of a conversation for Steve and Bucky to have with each other. For now, Sam had other plans, and he told Bucky as much.

“Not right now we’re not. I have other plans for you now that you’re not frozen. There are _so many_ space movies to watch. And did you know Wakanda has an amazing observatory and planetarium up in the mountains behind the capital? Because they do, and I know your nerdy, space-loving ass would have a field day there. Also, I’m pretty sure you haven’t tried half the delicious Wakandan fruits, you have got to add those to your list.”

Bucky’s smile grew as Sam rambled on, until he was giving Sam that light up the world smile that transformed his whole face, his eyes sparkling. Sam was maybe a little dazzled by it in such close quarters, dazzled enough to stop his rambling and smile helplessly back at him, until Bucky brought his right hand to Sam’s face, and pulled him close to kiss him.

For a bare instant, time stopped for Sam, and he felt the smallest shift of Bucky’s body that said he was maybe going to draw back, but then Sam got on board with this very welcome surprise, and kissed Bucky back, still mostly close-mouthed and tender. He brought his own hands up to Bucky’s soft hair, the hinge of his strong and stubbled jaw. Sam could feel Bucky’s lips begin to smile against his own, and Bucky brought his left hand to Sam’s hip to anchor him before he set about kissing Sam with relentless, gentle focus, coaxing a moan out of Sam with his thoroughness, with the overwhelming sensation. It was a good thing Sam was sitting down, because this was a knee-weakening kind of kiss, a dip you back and go to town kind of kiss, and Sam was just along for the very nice ride. When Bucky finally pulled back with a happy little hum, Sam swayed forward into him for more reasons than just breathlessness and the giddiness of a perfect first kiss. Bucky’s thumb rubbed tender little circles where he was grasping Sam’s hip, and his eyes were dark, still creased up into a smile.

“I like those plans,” said Bucky.

After that kiss, Sam’s priorities were shifting pretty decisively to wanting to skip any date-like outings and jump ahead to more hot and heavy post-date activities. For now though, Sam would take makeouts on the couch as a perfectly acceptable happily ever after. 

“Yeah, let’s stay here for a little while though,” said Sam, and moved in for another kiss.

 

* * *

 

Later, when the credits for Apollo 13 were rolling and Bucky was wrapped around him on the couch, a comfortingly warm and heavy weight, Bucky started humming. Sam didn’t register just what it was he was humming at first, too distracted by the pleasant vibration the sound made against his own chest, but when he did recognize it—

“Seriously, Barnes?”

“Let it go, let it go, can’t hold it back—” Sam dumped him off the couch, and Bucky fell, laughing, and struggled to make his face serious again, making an attempt at that stupid big puppy dog eyes look.

“But I thought I was the prettiest princess, even when I was frozen—”

“Okay, first of all, Elsa is a queen, and second of all, where did you even hear that song—”

Bucky snorted and grinned up at Sam. “Not even living off the grid in Bucharest was enough to keep me from hearing about that damned movie and that song.” He bit his lip, looked up at Sam beseechingly. “So, do you not think I’m the—”

Sam threw a couch cushion at Bucky and groaned as his face heated with an embarrassed blush. “Can we not talk about this? I want it noted that I have never called you a princess, but can we just—”

“Let it go?”

“You are the literal worst. I hate you.”

Bucky tugged Sam off the couch and settled him so he was straddling Bucky, maneuvering and holding him with ease, which was pretty goddamn distracting. “Hmm, but if you’re the knight in shining armor, or Prince Charming, so to speak, that would make me the princess in this situation, but, y’know, one of those modern ones who doesn’t just sit around waiting and kicks some ass…”

There was a decidedly wicked cast to the smirk on Bucky’s lips now, and it turned out Sam was very into that, and also the way Bucky’s big hands spanned his hips.

“Yeah, maybe,” said Sam, and leaned down to nip at Bucky’s lower lip and the skin of his throat, which made Bucky let loose a very gratifying little moan.

It was just when Bucky’s hands had made a very welcome migration to Sam’s ass, and Sam had slid his hands up under Bucky’s shirt to touch warm, muscled skin that they were cruelly interrupted.

“Hey guys, I was talking to Natasha and—Bucky? Sam? Are you guys here—” Steve came around to the living room area and saw them on the floor. “Oh. Oh wow, um, I’ll just, uh, go, then—”

Bucky banged his head a little against the floor. “Goddammit, Rogers, are you going to be a cockblock in this century too?”

Steve stopped beating a hasty retreat judging by the sound of his feet. Sam couldn’t see, because he was busy dying of embarrassment with his face smushed against Bucky’s impressively broad chest. Captain America had just caught him debauching his best friend. Sam wanted sweet merciful death to take him.

“Excuse you, James Buchanan Barnes! I did not see the signal anywhere near the door!” _The signal?_

“What signal? I don’t remember any signal, I have amnesia! Learn to knock!”

“This is my suite!” protested Steve.

Bucky groaned. “Please just get out, oh my god.”

“Fine!” said Steve, and Sam could hear the manic grin in his voice. “I’m really happy for you two!”

“Out!” yelled Bucky, and Sam heard the door close. Bucky ran a hand over the back of Sam’s head, cupped his skull in his broad palm, and then said thoughtfully, “Ooohhh, the _signal_. Whoops.”

“I’m not even going to ask,” said Sam into Bucky’s chest. Then he had a devious, dirty thought that made him grin against Bucky’s shirt before he lifted his head to waggle his eyebrows at Bucky. “So princess, wanna try for a happy ending?”

Bucky just looked at him for a second before understanding dawned. Then he dropped his head back on the floor and laughed until he was breathless. Sam ended up laughing too, Bucky’s laughter too precious and infectious to resist, and thought, _I wouldn’t mind seeing this every day for the foreseeable future_. Whatever else happened, wherever they ended up, that would be happily ever after enough for Sam.


End file.
